Looking Back, Moving Forward

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Athene Donald

This post is crossposted from the Royal Society’s own blog, appearing on March 2nd 2026.

From March 2025 to March 2026, The Royal Society has been commemorating the 80th anniversary of the election of the first women Fellows and honouring the achievements of women in STEM.

In 1945 the Royal Society finally admitted its first female Fellows: the crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale and the biochemist Marjory Stephenson. It had taken quite a while to reach this point after the first woman was nominated in 1902.  That was Hertha Ayrton, whose nomination was thrown out on the grounds that she was a married woman and therefore had no standing under the legal system of the time. However, even after the passing of the 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act, there was no immediate move to nominate other women. It took until 1943 for this subject to be seriously revisited, leading (after the Fellowship had been consulted, of course all men) to the election of these first two trail-blazing women in 1945.

Since then, the number of women in the Fellowship has slowly grown to its present percentage of around 14%. That is still a disappointingly low proportion, but looking at the rate of recent elections it can be seen that, averaging over the past five years, the percentage of women elected each year has been 27.6% to the Fellowship and 29.4% to Foreign Membership. Not yet good, not yet anywhere near parity, but a healthy increase. Sadly, these things take time and in many of the disciplines within the Royal Society’s remit, the pool of senior women who could be nominated also remains stubbornly low and well below 50%.

So, what needs to be done now, after 80 years of slow progression? There is a fundamental problem about the pipeline of female talent starting out. This is particularly acute in my field of the physical sciences.

The message conveyed to too many girls and young women is that subjects like computing, engineering or physics are not for them.  We need to counter this at all levels of society, but change has to start within the school environment.  . Everyone has a part to play in countering such unhelpful stereotypes, and demonstrating that everyone is welcome within the scientific community across all disciplines.

Talent needs to be celebrated wherever it is found, regardless of sex, skin colour or socioeconomic status.  The Royal Society, as an institutionhas to ensure it that principle: be it in the portraiture on its walls or the prizes it awards; the composition of its committees or its fellowships at every stage. .

Only then will the Royal Society be fully representative of the scientific population, ready to do its best for the future of science.

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The Doing of Science

Posted on February 25, 2026 by Athene Donald

In my retirement I have more time to read than ever used to be the case, and I enjoy reading books about science, scientists and the way they have, both in the past and currently, approached their science and their lives. There are comparatively few autobiographies out there; I understand ‘memoir’ is not a popular genre with publishers right now, so we aren’t likely to see a flood of these hitting the shelves any time soon. Few books like Venki Ramakrishnan’s personal account of unravelling the ribosome, Gene Machine, or the somewhat harrowing account of her early life by Lindy Elkins-Tanton, A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman, describing how she surmounted many odds. Nor others like the sad story of Erin Zimmerman essentially being forced out of science by circumstances beyond her control in Unrooted. I find these books fascinating reading, but clearly publishers feel there is no money in them so, for scientists young and old, there are few accounts to get their teeth into, nor narratives to impart to non-scientists about how scientists go about their life and work.

I like picking quotes out of these books that either resonate with me or strike me as telling. This proved very helpful for quoting in my own 2023 book, Not Just for the Boys. In Venki’s book there is the wonderful description of the excitement and joy of research going well (in this case placing a protein in the 30S subunit, for those fascinated by the ribosome), that it was ‘like eating crisps. Once he did the first one, he couldn’t stop.’ Visions of a tube of Pringles spring to mind, to keep one going while dealing with some knotty problem. Or Donna Strickland’s slightly tongue in cheek description after winning the Nobel Prize:

“It is truly an amazing feeling when you know that you have built something that no one else ever has and it actually works. There really is no excitement quite like it — except for maybe getting woken up at 5 in the morning because the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation also think it was an exciting moment for the field of laser physics.”

Looking to a much earlier literature, I am currently reading the book Gary Wersky wrote in 1978, The Visible College, describing a ‘collective biography’ of five famous left-wing/communist scientists who flourished both before and after the second world war. In this book he spells out part of his motivation at the time:

“Scientists, by contrast, are almost complete strangers to most of us, because we do not know where they come from or how they spend their time. Indeed, having been denied access to their history and culture, we are often tempted to regard them as pretty uninteresting people.”

It seems to me that the general public gets little opportunity to gain insight into a scientist’s life: what makes us tick and what keeps us going when the going is (inevitably) tough, or spurs us on the way when finally things start going right. We probably do seem like ‘complete strangers’ to the majority of citizens. I think this is a gap in the published world. I believe it is a mistake, both because so much tax-payers money is put into science in one way or another, and democracy demands that people understand why this is money well spent (and it’s not just because science has to be instrumental), but also because science is a central part of our culture. Books on history, geography and allied topics are allowed to get quite technical, relying on much background knowledge to be fully understood. Yet somehow they are still regarded as suitable for mass markets (I would cite both Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed and William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road in this category). Science isn’t treated in the same way. The publishing world seems to hold science to a different standard, or perhaps I mean holds the public to a different standard of knowledge so that only ‘popular’ science, assuming little prior knowledge, gets published as a trade book.

Science is a human endeavour, done by humans with all their faults (think Jim Watson, for instance) or virtues (Jocelyn Bell Burnell is a shining example of someone who gave away a vast prize – the Breakthrough Prize – to support scientists of the future who lack means to pursue their dreams). Why should the reading public, the typical citizen, not have access to accounts of what actually goes on in the lab to help them understand if it’s a career for them or their family? Science is too often treated as a strange place inhabited by nerds.

The mantra of ‘follow the science’ used during the pandemic by those who almost certainly had a poor grip of any of science’s constituent parts, was a somewhat dangerous mantra in that there is no ‘the’ in science. The uncertainties that accompanied early advice, the continuing lack of clarity over Long Covid, highlights that following ‘the’ science can be of limited use when knowledge itself is limited, but pushing against those limits is exactly how science progresses. Scientists today need to keep fighting against those who rail against, for instance, vaccinations and climate change. (This brings to mind another salutary recent book I’ve read: Science under Siege, which highlights the challenges scientists in those fields face as politics and money trumps knowledge and expertise.)

But if science is to be bundled away in the technical press, not opened up to the wider public as history so readily is, then much of the way that science proceeds – with taxpayers’ money – will be rendered obscure and therefore potentially ‘suspect’ or ‘not for me’, or just plain odd and irrelevant. I wish there were more books out there that talked about the actual ‘doing’ of science, that a teacher could read to enthuse their classes with some reality not some curriculum-based dry facts implying science is a solved problem not a wonderful puzzle. (And yes I know there are some fantastic books designed for young learners in the classroom about the science itself.) But we need more books that bring to life the life of science, that tell it like it is in the career of a researcher and which are accessible to the non-expert.  However, to date my own approaches to agents to try to pitch a book to help to fill the void have so far fallen on stoney ground. I will keep trying….

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Conflicts of Interest

Posted on February 15, 2026 by Athene Donald

Many years ago, before I was even a professor and still a newbie when it came to sitting on decision-making committees, I had a very disturbing experience at one particular grant-giving meeting. The details of what, who and where aren’t important, but the behaviour of the Chair and his (yes, it was a man, though that’s probably not relevant) pals around the table is what I want to discuss. I wasn’t the only woman on the committee, but the other woman was out of the room, as it was a grant from her husband that was under discussion. Again, although this couple were quite unknown to me and their research far from my field, it was clear some of the others – including the Chair, who I’ll refer to as Prof A – knew the couple well.

On the face of it, the grant application was not well received and the referees’ reports were not supportive. The startling thing was when Prof A said ‘ah well, we all know what he was trying to say’ and wanted to argue that the proposal should be funded. Others around the table nodded that the guy was a good guy and the grant should be supported. I sat there gobsmacked. I was not alone. I may, in those far off days, have felt too far out of my depth and of insufficient seniority to object, but someone else did. (I’d like to think if no one else had spoken up, I would have done, but who knows at this distance in time.) They pointed out that interpreting what the applicant wanted to say in this case but not in any others, was unreasonable. In essence, that the committee were attempting to rewrite the application mentally and on the spot.  After some discussion, the proposal was scored (appropriately) quite lowly and we all moved on.

It left a very nasty taste in the mouth. Up till that point I had regarded Prof A as a good chair. He was business-like in general, kept the discussions moving on without allowing anyone to grandstand so that we kept to time, and held the committee together when there were internal tensions between what one might term the old guard who had one view of the field, and the more modern quantitative side. However, his manoeuvring on this occasion really shocked me and it made me wonder how much other grants had been steered to success (or failure) in more subtle ways. I may say, Prof A went on to a senior leadership role in the UK, and I did wonder (although our paths never crossed again) whether he still had this blind spot about his mates. This would have mattered greatly in that subsequent position.

I would like to think conflicts of interest are handled better now, with more explicit guidelines being common. However, they are differently interpreted between different bodies. Sometimes a grant-assessing committee requires anyone from the same institution as the applicant to leave the room. If the application is actually from, say, three universities, then numerous people may leave the room. Those left in the room may not be the experts, and it is hard to believe the applicant(s) are getting a fair hearing. I’m not sure what the answer is to this problem, but sometimes excluding someone from a Zoology department because an application from Maths in the same institution has applied may feel a bit like overkill.

Then, particularly with fellowships of different sorts, there is the question of who can be a referee. Sometimes a collaborator, who knows the individual well, is excluded because they’ve co-written papers (often a time limit of five years is put on that), or a PhD supervisor is ruled out, either (or both) of which can leave, particularly if anyone from your institution is also excluded, the early career researcher scrabbling around to find someone suitable. Excluding those who know an individual well means that references may come in that are very bland, offering little more insight than the stuff already available in the submitted paperwork.

Moving up the career ladder, it may not be simply your science that is being judged, but also leadership skills, the ability to chair meetings or effect change. But, again, those outside your institution may not have had much opportunity to see an individual act in these capacities. A colleague you know well through your research may have little to say about your strategizing.

I am minded to think through this as I wade through a pile of applications for early career overseas fellowships. In this case, someone at the intended home institution has to write a reference explaining their willingness to host the person concerned. These letters are intensely variable, in ways that may have no bearing on the candidate. Obviously, it’s good if the applicant and the host have had some interaction, but not when it is the student’s recent PhD supervisor who has just moved overseas and wants to take their student with them. That seems to me to be missing the point of the fellowships of broadening experiences. On the other hand, if it is the head of the overseas department, however strong a bond may have formed between applicant and the group they are going to work with, all that may appear on paper is a letter promising to provide space and IT support. That may be the bare minimum required, but it is not helpful. Sometimes one feels one email between hosting PI and applicant is all that has so far transpired, which does not give confidence either. But none of this may have anything to do with the strength of the applicant.

I’m not sure what the answer to this broad-ranging conundrum is. The more I think about how we judge others in the sciences (and probably elsewhere), the less confidence I have that any assessment can avoid one kind of bias or unfairness or another. One certainly doesn’t want the kind of behaviour that I started this post off with. But whose letter of reference should one trust to be totally objective? And can one exclude oneself, the reader and judge, from having one’s own biases (as opposed to scientific judgement) about the particular group or sub-discipline that turns up on the application form?

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KPIs – a Mixed Blessing

Posted on February 8, 2026 by Athene Donald

I have sat on enough committees when KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are discussed, to know that they can be very helpful in moving an agenda forward and identifying where sticking points may be blocking progress. However, they should never be the only goal in any programme of work, nor used slavishly without thought. To take one specific item that arose at a meeting I was at recently: is the number of university spin-outs a good KPI? Or should one only count those that have had £X invested in them, or have more than Y employees. Or survived for more than Z years, licensed their product to a certain number of companies, with a turn-over exceeding some figure….and so on. Creating a spin-out company is, in many ways, the easy bit, but there are all those other metrics that could alternatively be chosen (and no doubt others I haven’t put my finger on) and choosing which to focus on may modify behaviour or lead to different ideas of ‘success’, for the individual or the university.

As criteria were being selected for REF2021 (if that isn’t an indelicate subject to bring up as the next cycle draws to a close), when I was chairing the Interdisciplinary Advisory Panel, we were sent a long list of possible metrics that could be used in the context of interdisciplinary research. After a lengthy debate, we decided that none was really fit for purpose. That put all the emphasis on to the panels to make judgements about quality (as well as whether they were genuinely interdisciplinary), but we were convinced that was the right path to follow. The extensive and thoughtful evidence review, The Metric Tide, more generally aimed at the entire REF process, highlighted many potential dangers in being too dependent on metrics, even though relying on them would undoubtedly have simplified the process and cut costs (but at a cost in a different sense). And as academic readers of this blog will no doubt know, academics (and associated administrative staff) are good at jumping through hoops and complying with the rules of whatever ‘game’ is being played.

Yet not ever using metrics has its own issues. How can one tell if progress is being made? The recent HEPI report, Making Metrics Matter: A more ambitious approach to tackling racial inequity in higher education, highlights why metrics still have a huge role to play in our universities. If one looks at the admission of racialised minority students into higher education, it can be seen great strides have been made. However, if these students then fail to thrive – as one could argue both the attainment gap and completion rates demonstrate – simply counting how many start a course is unhelpful. The reality is, as ever, the right question has to be asked. Too often it isn’t.

To take a different example from education, what is happening in (English) schools? The various measures of success – for a school – derive from exam results. The period Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education saw rapid changes in what was valued. At the time I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee. We responded at speed to multiple ‘consultations’, suspecting responses from us and others in the wider community were not going to change anything, not least because the speed of decision-making hinted at no one having time to read what was submitted.  The recently-removed idea of the E-Bacc came from this time, and has met with substantial opposition over the years, so its termination will not be much regretted. However, the Gove view was always that it is simply about standards, and that is what should be pushed in schools. I had a conversation once with William Hague (back when I was Master of Churchill College and he’d been giving a talk there), when my attempts to discuss school education with him, simply led to the blanket comment that the standing of English schools had improved in the PISA tables, so we must be doing things right. He wasn’t interested in whether this focus on a ‘knowledge-rich’ education was appropriate for the current world, with Google at children’s finger-tips and the world of work so different from when he was growing up.

Every child achieving and thriving is the current Government’s mantra, and there is absolutely no doubt that they are investing in ways to make that possible, starting with substantial investment into family hubs, early years’ provision, breakfast clubs and so on. But, leaving aside those children who start school not ‘school ready’ and who may struggle to catch up, there are many children for whom the transition to secondary school is difficult and who disengage during their teens when faced with a curriculum that is only directed at exam grades. Teenagers themselves have spelled out how they would like to learn more about financial management for instance. The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review had little to say about this. A recent commentary spells out how the mood music in the profession is shifting away from the Gove ‘traditionalist’ approach, wanting to see less emphasis on the metrics of exam grades. Nor is this simply related to the huge challenge of rising SEND numbers, but rising mental health issues (a problem HE faces too) should tell us all is not well: forcing round pegs into square holes never works. Teachers need time in their working day to consider pupils in the round, according to local circumstances for instance, and not just be bound by centrally-driven metrics that may work for one locality but not another.

KPI’s – definitely a mixed blessing, and to be used with caution not slavishly.

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She’s a Feisty Little Thing!

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Athene Donald

Many women I know get their dress commented on, or their general appearance, rather than the excellence – or otherwise – of their science. I’ve yet to hear someone comment on a man’s choice, or absence, of tie, or the state of his hair. It’s a trivial example but, alongside other subtle forms of denigration, such as not using a woman’s title in an introduction while according that privilege to a man, it is intensely frustrating. It is also nothing new.

Margaret Cavendish

The very fact that Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (shown here), was known as Mad Madge back in her lifetime in the seventeenth century, immediately conveys a sense of how people reacted to her. She dared to stand out – both in dress and activities. She wrote. Copiously and under her own name. These were not suitable female tracts about domesticity or religion, but about much larger issues including those relating to science (or natural philosophy as it was known back then). She was an atomist; she experimented with lenses and microscopes during her exile in France and formed her own opinion about their utility; she worried about animal experimentation and vivisection (notably by William Harvey) when this was a barely considered issue. She wrote about all these things and set out a vision of an alternative world in what might be said to be the first book of science fiction, The Blazing World (1666). In this book she had critical comments about the rather newly formed Royal Society and its Fellows, whom she satirised as ‘bird men’, ‘fox men’ and ‘spider men’.  It is perhaps not surprising that when, a year later, she visited the Royal Society (the visit was only approved with great reluctance), the general view of her was damning.

Samuel Pepys, who would soon assume the role of the young Society’s President, referred to her as a ‘mad, conceited ridiculous woman’ and commented that her dress was ‘so antick…I do not like her at all’.  There is no doubt she chose to dress very eccentrically, including sometimes in male attire. But, then as now, it ought to be possible to go beyond superficial matters such as clothing and focus on the content of what is being said or written. Cavendish wrote a lot. She wanted to be remembered by posterity (as she now is), explicitly writing early on ‘all I desire is fame’, and continuing to hope, mainly unsuccessfully, for her ideas to be given serious thought. She simply went against all society’s rules for how a woman, even a duchess, should comport herself.

Being eccentric was one way of attracting attention, but also not one that was likely to ensure that that attention was serious. I’ve learned a lot about Margaret Cavendish over the years, having partaken in two panel discussions about her life and impact. Firstly on Free Thinking (although on that recording, most of my remarks were excised, presumably in order to reduce the length of the programme); secondly in a panel discussion last autumn about the marginalisation of women in Philosophy and Science, with The Philosopher (video here).  In both cases Francesca Peacock was also on the panel and, if you want to know more about Cavendish, Peacock’s book Pure Wit, describes her life in lively detail. Or, if short of time, a chapter about her is included in Richard Holmes’ book, The Long Pursuit.

Why have I chosen now to bring all this up? Partly because I’ve been asked to write something for the Royal Society’s celebrations of 80 years since the first women were elected to the Fellowship and I wanted to include a few words about Cavendish’s ill-fated visit to the Society as the first woman to be allowed in (but then had to trim it in the interests of length). But also because of something said to me recently by a visitor to Cambridge about her daughter. This young woman had just embarked on a university course related to Physics and was finding her environment far from congenial. It seemed that the men she was paired with simply took over, elbowed her out of the way, when it came to practical work.  ‘But’, the mother said, ‘she’s a feisty little thing.’ I felt indignant on the daughter’s behalf that this was what it took to survive, in 2026, on a Physics-related course. Whereas, around the time Yale first admitted women and Eileen Pollack found the Physics course unwelcoming, as described in her 2015 book, The Only Woman in the Room, about her time at Yale in the mid 1970’s, that could be forgiven, perhaps, as consistent with the fact Yale hadn’t really adjusted to women on campus. But now? Really?

Women wanting to pursue a Physics-related career should not need to be feisty to survive – or eccentric, or have their dress referred to or any of the other indignities both Cavendish and Pollack, some centuries later, had to endure. We need women of all dispositions in our workplace, not just the ones who dare to stand up for their corner. It is depressing to feel that our university labs are still so often hostile, and whoever is in charge of them, be they professors or PhD students, don’t think it is important enough to intervene when a woman is being patronised or bullied (on the limited information I have about this particular case, I don’t know which, but neither is acceptable).

What will it take for women to feel at home in a Physics Lab? We don’t only want the ‘feisty’ to be the ones who survive. I recall something Curt Rice said to me twelve years ago ‘Put a single woman in a group of men’, he said, ‘and she will feel uncomfortable and awkward. Put a single man in a group of women and he will feel in charge.’ (The full blogpost in which I refer to this is here; the word feisty appears there too.) Clearly, we need men to feel less at home, less entitled, less ‘in charge’. And if the men in the room aren’t able to act appropriately, it also needs a watchful supervisory eye and determined intervention.

 

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