Self Confidence Amidst a Pandemic

Posted on December 11, 2021 by Athene Donald

I am sure readers share my gloom at the necessity of re-introducing tighter restrictions in our lives as Omicron spreads. It’s almost two years since the virus first swam into public view in the UK, twenty-one months since academics rapidly learned the joys of Zoom and Teams and ‘pivoted’ to online lectures. As for now, although pretty irrelevant in a university such as mine where teaching term is already over, the Department for Education wants teaching in person to continue. Who knows what the situation will be in the New Year, despite the wonders that vaccination may have done for our immune systems? Will that be enough to protect not only us as individuals, but also the NHS (and the economy)?

Whatever the details of the infectivity of Omicron, I fear there is no way we are not condemned to a continuing parade of cries of ‘you’re muted’, ‘you’re still muted’ and ‘I’m sorry, my camera doesn’t seem to be working’ in the months ahead. Even if some, possibly most, teaching is in person, I fear committee meetings will continue through the screen. The impossibility of reading body language or catching someone in the coffee break will persist, surely to the detriment of effectiveness, not to mention comradeship. I will not be alone in finding this ongoing prospect deeply depressing, just when it had seemed there was a glimmer of light at the end of the virus tunnel.

Holding a committee meeting by Zoom is bad enough, but one thing I probably find even more perturbing, disorienting even, is to give a webinar, speaking to a screen which only displays my own set of slides.  In other words, no audience is visible as you talk over your slidepack. Even if multiple screens are set up so there is a gallery of tiny faces visible somewhere within one’s field of vision, it is impossible to make much sense of reactions. It is as bad as talking to oneself, except you aren’t and you know there is an audience responding out there, but you have no idea how. In the early days of this blog I wrote about how essentially the same talk can be received in substantially different ways (for instance as judged by the percentage of the audience who appear to go to sleep or, conversely, who nod sagely). I can’t always work out why a talk does or doesn’t go down well, but in this remote world of Zoom, I often don’t even know which has happened. Sometimes the very fact that no (virtual) hands go up at the end is an indicator the talk hasn’t landed well, but at other times you get a smattering of questions and you’re still none the wiser.

At this (late) stage of my career this may not matter too much, but I feel for those starting out who have to try to find out what works solely in this virtual world. Without audience reactions, how is one supposed to learn the tricks of the trade? I do not think this is good for self-confidence. The ultra-confident will no doubt believe, correctly or not, that their brilliance has gone down a storm. The less confident will, on the other hand, have nothing to go on to build up their confidence, to convince them that their arguments were coherent and their conclusions received rapturously.

Self-confidence is such a tricky beast in academia. We spend our lives putting out ideas, waiting for them to be shot down.  Indeed, scientific progress is only made via that process. Throughout our careers, the worry that a new pet theory has some gaping hole in it which will only be manifest after giving a presentation, may be ever present. In my experience, talking to a bunch of familiar people (one’s former supervisor or boss, for instance) may be even more nerve-wracking than talking to a bunch of strangers. I can remember various occasions when nerves felt much worse because my late mentor Ed Kramer was in the audience. On one of those occasions, at a major international conference – at a time when I was no greenhorn – my hand shook so much when using the laser pointer I realised I needed to hold it in both hands to steady the beam, to make sure it hit the slide where I wanted it. (Of course, Zoom removes that particular problem, but it’s a minor recompense.)

I guess one take-home message is that, when attending a webinar given by an ECR, kind words by email (if appropriate) might be appreciated to provide reassurance from the otherwise empty feedback. Self-confidence needs to be nurtured in those for whom it’s in short supply. However, it isn’t always easy to tell whose does need bolstering. Those obnoxious characters who appear to ooze it, may just be good at covering up. My own experience is that students/postdocs who, in one-to-one situations appear to be very timid, may nevertheless come across forcefully. Less commonly, those who seem in private totally on top of things, may end up mumbling to their shoes (although I’m not quite sure how that might manifest itself on Zoom, since eye contact is not something easily done in the best of circumstances through a screen).

Thinking back to my own early research career, when a research fellow and a young lecturer, I remember just how much my confidence was dented by others who appeared to know it all, have it all, even if they were actually more or less my contemporaries and didn’t particularly go on to the stellar careers they no doubt envisaged. In my case it was less criticising my presentations, more in criticising the somewhat eclectic materials I chose to study. Was it physics, was the implication? I took that message to heart, worrying for years I should have stayed put in the materials science departments in which I’d done my postdocs. I shouldn’t have worried. Straying into food physics back in the 1980s and 1990s was an uncomfortable thing to do, when physicists didn’t relish such a topic. Now it’s become rather fashionable, a point I noted several years ago, but – as ever – at the start of a career it is so much harder to be sure one is on a good track, not somehow going down a pointless blind alley. I can look back now and realise I was essentially ahead of the game, but it didn’t stop the anxiety at the time.

The advent of yet further delays in normal meetings due to Omicron, may make the anxious more anxious – about their science as well as their daily lives – and may prevent the healthy interactions with peers and gurus that help further scientific discoveries. It is not surprising, whether lacking self-confidence or not, the winter feels a little greyer for – I would guess – all of us, as the news about infections gets grimmer.

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Level Up and Multiply

Posted on December 2, 2021 by Athene Donald

As we await the delayed Levelling Up White paper, to my mind it is encouraging that Michael Gove (Secretary of State for Levelling up, Housing and Communities) is drawing together a cabinet committee to focus on these matters, drawing membership from across different Government Departments. If regional inequalities are to be reduced, it obviously cannot be done by one department alone, as so many different facets of life and the economy are involved. Integration matters.

In the arena of research and innovation, a key paragraph in the October 2021 Comprehensive Spending Review stated that

“the government will ensure that an increased share of the record increase in government spending on R&D over the SR21 period is invested outside the Greater South East”.

All eyes will be on UKRI to see how this may be achieved, and particularly so when it comes to the significant and ring-fenced uplift in funds directed towards Innovate UK. How will they bring place into their decision-making, and how will they ensure it is the ‘right’ place in this context, i.e. outside the Greater South East?

Another relevant statement in the CSR document, albeit not one that has had as much publicity as maybe it should have done, refers to a new programme called Multiply. This is described as

“a new UK-wide programme to equip hundreds of thousands of adults with functional numeracy skills to improve their employment prospects.”

This statement does not specify the actual skills level that is being referred to, but presumably this is more likely to be at level 2 than anything higher. There are, after all, large numbers of adults who never passed their GCSE in maths. Improving their functional numeracy will help them both in their job prospects and in managing their personal (not least financial) affairs more effectively.  It is with regard to programmes like this that it becomes clear why Gove is right to bring different ministers together to work out how levelling up can be supported as an overarching agenda. Both the Department for Education and BEIS should be interested, as well as Gove’s own Department and, one assumes, the Treasury, in the Multiply programme.

There is, needless to say, little detail about how Multiply will operate. Who will deliver Level 2 qualifications in maths? It isn’t likely to be schools and the obvious candidates will be the Further Education Colleges. However, that leads us straight to the absence of the long-awaited response to the Augar Review. Maybe this will turn up soon, as promised, but that promise has been on the cards for a very long time. Unless the issues associated with funding of FE colleges get resolved, such a large-scale programme aimed at ‘hundreds of thousands’ of adults will be hard to get off the ground. Of course, if the money is separately available as of now, perhaps some tweaking round the edges along with this injection of cash will suffice, but it won’t solve the bigger picture of all the additional Level 3 and 4 qualifications needed or renewed focus on adult upskilling in areas other than numeracy. And such upskilling is of course vital to the levelling up agenda, as repeated announcements make clear, even if there is less clarity about how and what this means.

According to a House of Commons Library briefing released last week, money is committed to the new programme, stating that Multiply

‘will be funded with £560 million from the UKSPF’,

in which UKSPF is the United Kingdom Shared Prosperity Fund, whose shape is still ill-defined. This briefing makes for very interesting reading regarding UKSPF, not least spelling out how long it has been in gestation and how little is still known about it. Yet it must have a crucial role to play in the levelling up agenda, not least in acting as a quasi-replacement for European Structural Funds.  This is what it was badged to do way back in 2017 when it was first announced in the Conservative Party Manifesto and restated in that year’s (now rather forgotten after Greg Clark’s departure) Industrial Strategy White Paper.

Over the past years, Structural Funds, amounting to around £2bn pa predominantly came from two separate funds: the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Social Fund (ESF). (There were two other smaller funds which contributed relatively little to the UK.)  ERDF funding mainly went to research and innovation, enhancing the competitiveness of SMEs and, to a lesser degree, supporting the shift towards a low carbon economy in all sectors, whereas the ESF was directed towards getting people into the workforce or helping them to improve their skills. Under EU rules, this money went to regions according (inversely) to the level of their economic development, as measured by GDP per person. Regions which were classified as less developed received proportionally more funding, so that – in terms of funds received per capita – Wales received the highest level of funding of the UK regions. How – and by whom – will money be distributed from UKSPF in the future remains unclear, since it certainly does not need to follow this pattern?

The House of Commons Library briefing makes for illuminating, if distinctly depressing reading about the UKSPF, as to how things have, or rather have not, progressed since the early announcements in 2017. Consultations about the shape of the Fund have been repeatedly promised ‘soon’, but have not yet materialised. In the 2020 Spending Review it was stated that

‘the total amount of funding made available will “ramp up” until it at least matches “current EU receipts”.’

Finally, in this autumn’s Comprehensive Spending Review, the details of the funding profile were released: £0.4 billion allocated for 2022/23, £0.7 billion for 2023/24, and £1.5 billion for 2024/25. This review also confirmed that

‘that the Fund would “at a minimum match the size of EU Funds in each nation” of the UK’

as well as making the same promise for Cornwall. However, there is clearly something of a shift towards skills development with less emphasis on wider economic factors compared with ESIF.

Having chaired a recent Royal Society roundtable in Coventry on investing in regional research and innovation with key local leaders in the West Midlands, one relevant message that came through clearly was the importance of not segregating funding for skills and infrastructure, but to think about the innovation landscape as a coherent ecosystem. Other clear messages were the crucial need to reduce bureaucracy and not impose artificial geographical boundaries that work against clusters of firms getting together to innovate. This approach to thinking about the criteria for the UKSPF in terms of integrated actions and not piecemeal, in order to deliver the most bang-for-their-buck I hope is a message those designing criteria for the fund bear in mind.

So, a long gestation and still no certainty about how most of this money will be distributed and on what. In the meantime, there has been an interim allocation of £220M to the UK Community Renewal Fund, controlled by Gove and his Department. This allocation has not been entirely smooth sailing, with the regions selected to bid for funds not necessarily being those regarded as the most deprived and with the outcomes of the bids not released until the start of November, yet with the money meant to be spent as soon as March 2022; a tall order for many of the projects. However, this pot of money clearly as yet nowhere near approaches the sorts of funds that the Structural Funds used to do or, that one hopes, the UKSPF will in due course.

Many questions. So few answers as yet forthcoming.

 

 

 

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Did Humphry Davy suffer from Impostor Syndrome?

Posted on November 25, 2021 by Athene Donald

When I think of Humphry Davy, I think of a scientist, someone who became a star attraction during the early days of the Royal Institution and inventor of the eponymous Davy Lamp (although at the time others accused him of plagiarising earlier designs). Of course, the word scientist did not exist in his day and, as Jan Golinski’s book The Experimental Self makes clear, Davy had a range of personae during his lifetime which reflected different aspects of himself and which he played up to different extents at different periods. (Undoubtedly he also thought of himself as a poet and someone who knew a thing or two about fishing.)

Don’t we all have such multiple personae? Golinski indicates how, in Davy’s lifetime, the concept of a ‘man of science’ was only just emerging. Part philosopher, part ‘enthusiast’ – which was verging on a term of abuse at that time, as overdoing things a bit and potentially dangerously radical – part discoverer (and also, part dandy and part traveller to complete Golinski’s list, although these are less relevant to a scientist). A fair degree of issues of class crept in too when people contemporaneously passed judgement on Davy: he came from a poor family in Cornwall but made a very advantageous marriage to a rich widow. (Incidentally, on Radio 3 a local Cornish group sang an amusing folksong about him as I was writing this post.)

The various epithets that might be tossed in the direction of a scientist these days might be different, although philosopher/philosophical might still be directed at some of us, but the fact that we exhibit different personae in different groupings is as true today as then. Take impostor and impostor syndrome. Many of us suffer from this, but many of us equally know how to cover it up and may come across as confident, even overly so by way of compensation, so that the underlying condition is hidden from view. I was amused to hear a mutual (scientific) male friend described to me by a woman as typically male-confident, when he was someone I knew perfectly well hid his own insecurities under an effective mask. Don’t we all? (Or nearly all.) This woman herself I’m sure would come across to the external world – and she is very much visible to the world through her writing and interviews – as confident, but she knew internally how different she was. The same mistaken belief, no doubt, could be applied to me.

When I wrote about impostor syndrome in the early days of this blog, implying women suffered from it more than men, one of the people who publicly responded over Twitter to my post, suggesting that men too, himself included, were very prone to it, was David Spiegelhalter. The pandemic has been full of his writings and pronouncements about the statistics of death, vaccination etc, all so beautifully clearly set out. He seems on the surface to be confident and willing to speak up in extremely public fora, despite his admission to feeling a fraud, an impostor. Equally he is willing to admit to his failures. I was amused by a recent tweet of his

 

indicating how he’d failed to unmute during a live interview – something else we are all liable to do in different situations. I did it very obviously in a meeting with the last Minister of Science, Amanda Solloway; it’s always the stress of a high-profile moment when these things go wrong. It would seem to be a natural tendency to feel a fraud, but then to put on a different external persona; those people you think are arrogant may indeed be quaking inside. I would suspect that Davy himself suffered from impostor syndrome, and hence he ‘invented’ these different personae to mask what he no doubt felt to be inadequacy, not least because of his humble roots.

David Spiegelhalter is a colleague of mine, on the Fellowship at Churchill College (not that I knew he’d become a colleague back in 2012 when I wrote that particular blogpost; I didn’t join until 2014).  But the College perhaps has surprisingly strong links to Davy himself, or at least to a current AHRC-funded project on the Davy Notebooks, on whose Advisory Board I sit. This is a fascinating project aimed at transcribing all his notebooks via Zooniverse, a crowd-sourcing platform (or citizen science if you’d prefer). They are, incidentally, always looking for new people to join in the transcription project, no previous experience required!

I learned a lot of what I know about Humphry Davy from the wonderful Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Churchill (again long before I joined the College).  He too is on the Advisory Board. I have written previously about the past and present meanings of ‘impact’ in science as discussed in an earlier book by Jan Golinski, a Professor in the History Department at the University of New Hampshire who held a postdoctoral fellowship at the College; he is also on the Advisory Board. The fourth member of the Board associated with Churchill is Alice Jenkins, Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Glasgow who is an alumna.  For a college so heavily associated with STEM subjects I find this grouping of the four of us on an AHRC-funded project fascinating. I hope it illustrates that, despite being also the College of CP Snow (he was a Founding Fellow) we absolutely don’t believe in the two cultures being distinct and never speaking to each other. I am proud of that.

 

 

 

 

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Skills, FE and Levelling Up

Posted on November 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

As we await various key Government papers – specifically the long-awaited response to the Augar Report and the Levelling Up White paper – the news is full of labour shortages. Whereas delivering some of Augar’s recommendations about funding for FE Colleges may not do much for the number of HGV drivers on the road, it may make a difference in the medium term to some of the smaller companies that sit somewhere on the low productivity tail. Much is frequently made of the contribution of high tech IT developments to the economy; the discussion of the future of ARM is not unimportant here. Nevertheless, the significance of employees in much lower tech companies who need to have the skills and confidence to use a spreadsheet to facilitate ‘just in time’ logistics, or to update costings if they have to raise pay for employees due to the loss of EU workers, is no small matter. This is where ensuring that FE Colleges are funded well enough to deliver that level of skill to a wider swathe of the population is so important. And, alongside that, that as the Lifelong Learning Loan Entitlement comes into play (unfortunately not till 2025), workers will have the financial means, if not security, necessary to return to education to gain the skills they need which either may not have been available to them when they were 16, or been obvious to them then that they would be useful.

The evidence that increased R+D intensity drives up economic prosperity and GDP seems broadly accepted now, as well as that that public sector funding crowds in private sector investment. Thus, the increase in money in the budget for research and innovation funding is a huge positive. Much of this money will provide a welcome fillip to the university sector, where there will be many people ready to take advantage of it. Backing up the researchers will be a team of technicians, whose input is often crucial in sustaining and delivering a project, particularly when they provide long-term stability and knowhow as research students and postdocs come and go. However, their own career progression is often forgotten, an issue the current TALENT Commission is examining in depth (a project I am pleased to be associated with), along with a survey of their experiences, with a report due to be published in the New Year.

But what about technical support in industry, broadly defined. By which I mean, industry not just in high tech areas, but other areas such as more basic manufacturing, logistics or public health-related, for instance? This is where upskilling the workforce comes into play as being a vital component. Here I would include IT skills as part of this technical support, not so much as a stand-alone component, but as a necessary contributor to overall skills. If you are entering data, let alone analysing it, these skills are vital.

A Royal Society report from earlier this year highlighted a worrying trend of this part of the workforce ageing and not being replaced by youngsters entering the pipeline. Choices children make at 14 or 16 probably play into this, and they are not necessarily getting access to good careers advice to help them make those choices. But, additionally, they may not find the courses they need to put their aspirations into action if the local FE College is unable to provide them. This comes right back to what is going to be delivered – not least in terms of funding – and to whom, when the Augar response is finally published.

The Skills for Jobs White Paper, published at the start of the year, suggests the Government is aware of the issues, with excellent overarching goals, of which three are particular pertinent to my arguments here:

  • Investing in higher-level technical qualifications that provide a valuable alternative to a university degree;
  • Making sure people can access training and learning flexibly throughout their lives and are well-informed about what is on offer through great careers support; and
  • Supporting excellent teaching in further education.

As the second of these bullet points shows, it is most certainly not just for school-leavers that thought must be given. The decline in opportunities for adults to upskill or reskill is an indictment of our society. The introduction of (initially) £9000 fees for university courses has had a massive impact on part-time adult learners at universities. The position over ELQs (Equivalent or Lower-level Qualifications), making it impossible to retrain if you already have a qualification at or above the level you are wanting to retrain at, has recently come back into sharp focus with recent comments by Chris Skidmore and Jo Johnson, both former HE Ministers, both calling for a rethink on this and associated entitlement to loans.

However, rhetoric and practice may be two very different things in this space and, despite the warm and encouraging noises, policy isn’t fixing the problems yet. The threat to defund BTECs, deferred but not removed, in favour of T Levels remains a concern when considering the education of those whose tastes may lie in less academic subjects. (BTECs have a good track record of facilitating entry to university for those who haven’t taken A Levels.) However good the concept of T Levels may be, it would seem that not enough thought has been put into how courses are going to provide the obligatory 45 days of placements in industry for each student. If this is the only route to qualifications post-16 other than A Levels, that’s a huge number of placements required and no guarantee of successfully finding them. By killing off BTECs, at speed, without resolving this issue, it is hard to see these vocational routes will succeed in their stated aims.

So we are in a position where there appears to be lots of good intent but without the wherewithal to achieve them. I would identify four issues in particular where words and action don’t completely align:

  1. Plans to offer loans to adults wanting to upskill, but who may have severe and utterly understandable reservations about taking on the requisite level of debt imposed by such loans;
  2. ‘Great career advice’ at every stage should be a no-brainer, but it is something that has not shown much sign of appearing and would need substantial additional funding;
  3. New vocational training routes, that require plenty of on-the-job training, but no guarantee the placements can be found;
  4. Nobody could object to the idea of ‘Excellent teaching in FE’, but without a response to Augar about funding this is unlikely to be able to materialise.

Levelling up touches all of this because, where the jobs are, where the people with the right skills are, and where the FE Colleges to deliver are may be non-intersecting sets and, without appropriate joining up of these key dots improved regional economies are unlikely to be transformed in the way that levelling up might be taken to mean by local populations. The stagnation of the UK’s productivity since the financial crash of 2008 is well-documented and undoubtedly has had a major impact on the reality of lives lived in ‘left behind’ regions. Investment in research and innovation is a crucial part of national recovery and regeneration, but money alone without people with the right skills is not sufficient. Current thinking about how lifelong learning will be delivered in ways that can actually make a difference still seems to be a bit foggy. One can only hope the Augar response and the Levelling Up White Paper finally part the clouds.

 

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Vaccines, Emotion and the Status of Women

Posted on October 17, 2021 by Athene Donald

I’ve been catching up with some reading this weekend: a year’s worth of (hard copy) THE issues, picked up now I’m finally able to get back into my department, and Vaxxers – sub-titled The Inside Story of the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine and the Race against the Virus. These cover the same period, but from rather different viewpoints. Take the period April-June in the THE articles, so many focussing on Covid-related topics: the rapid adoption of online teaching, the ‘Zoomiverse’, the dawning appreciation of the potential damage to careers, particularly for early career researchers and those with caring responsibilities, plus the likelihood that a researcher’s productivity will plummet and the need to be kind to oneself and others when this happens.

With hindsight, perhaps we were too optimistic that this situation wouldn’t last long and that within a few weeks, which then stretched into months, all would return to normal. Of course, it hasn’t. To different degrees around the world, life is still strange, worrying and, for many, Covid-related health issues remain. Carers’ lives are still upended and the lasting impact on careers unclear (but unlikely to be positive). Although for a lot of us, by this point some meetings are now held in person, many are still not conducted remotely. What ‘normal’ will eventually look like is not yet clear.

But long before Covid hit the UK, the Oxford vaccine team were already moving into top gear, as soon as stories of a strange illness began to surface in Wuhan. Sarah Gilbert – the one who has a Barbie doll in her likeness – and Churchill College alumna Cath Green, had read the China tea leaves and realised it was time to direct their existing vaccine platform to target this specific virus to give themselves – and the world – a head start in developing tools to weaken (though not yet neutralise) the virus’ impact. While most of us were adapting to working from home, this pair and their teams were flat out in their labs, working out all the necessary steps to produce the vaccine in record time. As the recipient of two doses of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, I can only be immensely grateful for their dedication, intellectual prowess, a firm grip on logistics of an incredibly complex chain of steps plus their ultimate achievements.

Their book is a gripping account, not just of these steps in some detail, explained in simple terms for the non-experts in their field, but also the emotional roller coaster of their work, the sleepless nights and the nerve-wracking interactions with the media as well as funders (there was no guarantee of success; funders are risk-averse and not used to working at the speed this situation demanded, but the money did come through). This all had to be followed by the anxious wait to see if the vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 trials (which, as we now know, it did). Scientists rarely speak up about some of these issues that can lurk under the public face of their work or the written word of journal publications. Rarely do they have such an intense media spotlight shone on them, week after week, as this pair did. Nor are the stakes often quite so high. It will be interesting to see if the BioNTech scientists, with their alternative route for successful vaccine development, choose to write their own story to complement Vaxxers.

As two immensely successful female scientists, I am also interested in what they have to say about the subject of emotional content. Their family lives intrude to some extent (both Green and Gilbert are parents, the latter of triplets, although none of their children are toddlers constantly interrupting zoom calls or needing much help with home schooling), so the huge problems many mothers have had to face while working from home did not beset them. Nevertheless, making time for family in the midst of handling the massive task they faced was by no means trivial. But it is more the commentary on the simple fact that they are female that intrigues me, inserted in passing in their wider narrative. Most of what I learned came from Green referring to Gilbert (they each wrote their own chapters from their own perspectives, more or less alternately throughout the book) rather than a first-hand account by the latter. Maybe this was a deliberate strategy.

For instance, Green quotes Gilbert as saying ‘something like’

“This is 2020. Why are we discussing women scientists? I’m not a woman scientist, I’m a scientist and more than half my colleagues are women and we do the job.”

The frustration at being seen as a woman first and a scientist second is palpable. That feeling will resonate with many, myself included. I have written previously about how the media referred to Dorothy Hodgkin when she won the Nobel Prize (“Oxford housewife wins Nobel“, according to the Daily Mail of the day.) Similar sorts of out-of-date comments were, perhaps unsurprisingly and as quoted by Green, used in describing members of the team: serious redhead mother to triplets (describing Gilbert), not your stereotypical Oxford boffin (Green) and Irish mother of two for Teresa (Tess) Lambe, a third team member. As Green remarks wryly, one of the men on the team has ‘never been described as ‘male scientist Andy Pollard’ nor, presumably, has his parental status been laid bare in the media.

Nevertheless, the balancing act between being annoyed by the gender issue or motherhood constantly being raised and using the opportunity to excite and inspire future generations of young women by being a visible role model is a delicate one. Not many scientists get to feature in Vogue (nor is it likely to have been an aspiration to do so for many).  A decade ago an article in The Lancet stated that

‘It’s impossible to be 100% sure, but Molly Stevens is in all likelihood the only person ever to have graced the hallowed pages of both The Lancet and Vogue.’

Whether or not that was true in 2012, Sarah Gilbert has undoubtedly joined her in appearing in that rare pairing of journals. As Green writes in Vaxxers

‘One of the more surreal moments of this year was Sarah’s high fashion photoshoot in the basement of the Jenner Institute. Sarah had already been to a London studio for a shoot for Vogue’s ’25 Women Shaping 2020’ earlier in the year. She said she thought it would be fun [we don’t get told if it was!] and not something she was likely to be asked to do ever again. But not long after Vogue she was approached by Harper’s Bazaar…she describes their shoot…. as ‘all slightly ridiculous’.’

Nevertheless, as Green makes clear, her view is that this is important and not ridiculous. Again, this resonates with me. When I won the L’Oreal/UNESCO 2009 Laureate for Europe for Women in Science I endured numerous photoshoots and interviews. I never actually saw, I’m relieved to say, the huge blown-up photographs of me that were plastered both on the side of L’Oreal’s Hammersmith headquarters or in Charles de Gaulle Airport, though I have a copy of the issue of Le Monde which had a full page devoted to my photo. However disconcerting for the individual, these photos convey an important message for the casual passer-by. Women do do science. Everyone should feel confident encouraging their daughters and other young women of their acquaintance to pursue science if that is their passion. If girls don’t see the faces of women scientists in their textbooks (and they don’t, as a recent American Chemical Society report made clear), they need to see them elsewhere in their daily lives. However uncomfortable I felt then, as Molly Stevens may have felt appearing in the pages of Vogue and presumably Gilbert did this year in all the publicity, it isn’t a bad – let alone vain – thing to do. It is, unfortunately, still necessary.

2020 was a weird year, as both Vaxxers and all those back issues of the THE make clear. Women do science, they do it at the top of the game, and yet too many are held back by caring responsibilities, by attitudes and by unconscious bias still operating. 2021 is little better as a year, but the battles must continue to ensure both that excellent science gets done and that the opportunity to do so is open to all.

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