Equity for Women Around the World

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Athene Donald

It is always good to be stretched beyond one’s own comfort zone, even if by definition it is an uncomfortable thing to do. Recently, I found myself stepping up to the podium to talk following four successive philosophers, whose take on the policy questions under discussion, was inevitably going to be very distinct in language and form from my own approach. The occasion was the Royal Society’s Discussion meeting on Science as a Global Public Good. The philosophers approached the problem from a variety of different viewpoints – what is a ‘public good’ and how does it differ from the commons, legally what is enshrined in different UN charters and so on.

What about the importance of science diplomacy? This was discussed in the talk immediately before mine by Angela Liberatore, a colleague I’d known back in the days I served on the ERC Scientific Council, although she has since moved on from heading up their research team. We need every kind of diplomacy we can get in this uncertain world. There may be scope for links with the USA, as detailed in this recent piece by Hollie Chandler from the Russell Group, but many scientists of my acquaintance will not attempt to enter the USA for conferences right now. Who knows what might be lurking on their phone that officials take exception to? That will not be helping diplomacy. Nevertheless, I recall many years ago how the Royal Society was supporting links with North Korea in the area (if I remember rightly) of volcanology, at a time when there were essentially no other links between the UK and that country.

My own talk was, perhaps predictably, much more rooted in numbers and facts than legal niceties, looking at the subject of women entering the scientific pipeline. There are some striking numbers out there. According to UNICEF data, globally119 million girls are out of school (34 million of primary school age, 28 million of lower-secondary school age and 58 million of upper-secondary school age). Those are striking numbers, and nothing that is happening in the world right now makes me confident that the numbers are likely to be improving. But, around the world, we need all the talent we can get to move the agenda forward, not just in terms of obvious innovation opportunities, but in terms of maternal and neonatal health, nutrition and vaccination choices. These are all issues that women are the prime movers in and denying them an education means they are less well positioned to make decisions around them, or appropriate innovations.

The week before this conference I had been at another two-day event at the Royal Society, this one the culmination of the organisation’s year of celebration around the election of the first female fellows, with the theme of focussing on where we are now and where we need to go around Women In STEM. On the Royal Society’s website you can find new analysis of HESA data from JISC; a new film about Hertha Ayrton’s life and contributions (the first woman nominated for Fellowship, but rejected on the grounds she was a married woman and, under the laws of the time, was therefore a ‘non-person’); and a map on which anyone can enter information about a female scientist from the past at their location. On the site there is also a brief blogpost from me about women at the Royal Society.

During the conference there were strong views expressed about the status of women in AI and the dangers of their absence as AI is developed, algorithmic bias being the most obvious and visible one. Chair of the session Wendy Hall was particularly strong on this point, and outspoken in an interview with Rachel Sylvester published ahead of the conference. There she spells out her worries with regard to Silicon Valley:

“It’s all tech bros. It’s very aggressive. Silicon Valley is very difficult for women to work in, but we need women there”.

Currently, in England, the percentages of girls taking Computing at GCSE or A Level are dismally low, so little is likely to change without a radical rethink in our education system. It is to be hoped that the revised curriculum in the subject provoked by the recent Curriculum and Assessment Review will improve the situation, but only if the school environment itself doesn’t put girls off. I am a strong believer in the importance of teachers not inadvertently reinforcing gendered stereotypes, and the whole school environment ensuring the school’s culture does not deter girls from typical ‘male’ subjects. This is a topic close to the heart of the DSIT secretary of State who has convened a Women in Tech Taskforce. They have a consultation currently open – so now is a good moment to submit your views on how the situation at all levels can be improved.

There were many fascinating sessions at the Royal Society Conference, highlighting where things have improved and where, inevitably, work needs to be done. At a societal level I feel it is hugely important we don’t simply look at the fact that, on average, girls are outperforming boys at school and therefore not look at the detail of what that means. If white working-class boys are struggling in school, that is clearly a massive target for improvement and the situation for them needs to be remedied. But if girls are passing their exams and then walking away from many of the subjects that would, not only satisfy them as individuals, but allow them to progress to some of the higher paying jobs – due to the messaging they receive from the world around them – we have a different sort of equity problem.  With so much attention paid to metrics of school performance, this problem is too easily overlooked. As Michele Dougherty said at this Women in STEM conference:

“‘we will know we have got equity when I no longer get asked if things were difficult for me.”

(Of course right now things are difficult for her, as Chair of STFC, but that’s a different problem.)

These past weeks of intense meetings have been simultaneously rewarding and exhausting. Sadly, the two meetings merely confirm that in this country and around the world, equity is still a long way off, in STEM and, still, at much more basic levels of education.

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Unintended Consequences

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Athene Donald

We appear to be living in a world currently beset by unintended consequences, or at least a world in which the main proponent does not seem to have thought about the consequences the rest of us now have to live through. In lesser matters, though, unintended consequences may also be rife, including in the pursuit of science and the role of leadership.

I am prompted to write this in part from a musical direction. I recently heard a piece of music I last encountered as a teenager, singing in a choir organised outside of school but run by the school’s music teacher. We were known, back then, as the Carissimi singers and this was a piece written by this very Giacomo Carissimi (ca 1604-74), Jeptha. It tells the biblical tale of a successful, if unwise, leader who, having won some battle, vows to sacrifice the first person he encounters on returning home. Sadly, for him and indeed her, this turns out to be his daughter. Radio 3 played the plangent tones of the final chorus as he laments his loss. Vows like that are dangerous things, but his unintended consequence only wiped out one person, unlike some current actions.

So, let’s scale down again. In our every day lives we may all perform actions that don’t turn out as we intended but are unlikely to lead to actual human sacrifice. Having spent the start of last week at the Royal Society’s conference on Women and the Future of Science (part of their celebrations of 80 years since the first female fellows were elected; I wrote a framing document for it), there was more cause to think about consequences, unintended or otherwise. In several of the sessions there was discussion about leadership, both how one acted as a leader, but also actions that had made a difference to each speaker during their career path. Empathy, support and above all kindness got a lot of air-time; one might wonder if panels of men would have mentioned the same topics, even if they equally identified with them.

It reminded me of one time when I thought I was being kind to a struggling PhD student, only to find that the consequence of that was not all that helpful.I had a student (male) who was writing up their thesis. As was usual in my conversations with students at this stage, I  would set him targets about what I wanted to see from him each week. To start with, every week he turned up empty-handed with plausible explanations why. I wanted to encourage him not deflate or bully him, so I accepted these excuses. Then he asked for longer between meetings, so he had time to complete things. Again, I went along with this. After about 3 months it became clear that this was not the right strategy. Once I pushed him harder, he admitted that he had completely failed to write anything and was in a complete tizz. Once he’d opened up to me, we agreed he should just come each week and talk about how he was, or wasn’t, getting on. That turned him around and in due course he completed the thesis and got his PhD. But I realised that being ‘kind’ had been anything but, as it just left him able to stay in denial about his own progress and leave me in the dark. A lesson learned. But every student is different and needs a ‘personalised’ strategy to get them through what can be a really challenging period.

As a supervisor, a teacher or any kind of mentor means that one’s words can have an effect that may or may not be intended. Again, this past week, we heard of women saying how being told they ‘couldn’t’ do something, or – probably even worse, they weren’t ‘up to’ doing something – pushed some people to stamp their feet and determine to show their interlocutor they were wrong. As a clear example of this, take Rita Colwell (the first woman to lead NSF in the States). In her book, A Lab of One’s Own in response to being told by a professor at Purdue that ‘we don’t waste fellowships on women’, she says:

‘My first reaction is dismay – quickly followed by anger at the injustice of this policy and at his off-handedness in telling me about it…..He seems to think I have no future. Well, I tell myself, I will damn well prove you wrong.’

And she did. That was 1956, but today as then, many people – regardless of gender – may have their hopes apparently dashed by some ‘off-hand’ remark, only for that to spur them on to achieve whatever it is they are apparently being denied. Unintended consequences, but in that framing a positive outcome, sadly not so often true.

As a leader and a mentor one can immediately see that brushing someone off carelessly and without thought, as that professor brushed Colwell off, is not a kind or caring thing to do. The trouble is, there will be people who may be aiming at something beyond their reach and it is necessary to let them down gently. That can also be kind, but it can appear to be quite brutal to the recipient. In reality, and as the panel at last week’s discussion made clear, for those (all women as it happens) who had succeeded, a helping hand, a frank piece of advice, sponsorship and just ‘being there’ as a support were the things that stuck in their mind and coloured their own leadership styles as they rose in seniority.

Business gurus tend to talk about ‘being authentic’ as the right way to lead. But if you are a testy, over-bearing soul being authentic may be very destructive for those around you. The mantra, I believe, means don’t be afraid to show your own weaknesses – perhaps you’re tired having spent the weekend visiting your elderly parents 200 miles away, or are struggling with PTSD or whatever upset is occupying your mind – but too many people may want to deny they have any weaknesses at all. In which case being authentic may lead to yet more unintended consequences, as an exhortation to a team to strive harder may come across as bullying and lead to resignations. I prefer the encouraging words that Ijeoma Uchegbu, spoke last week, having experienced this herself when junior, that it is ‘always important to show empathy and kindness.’  We should all remember these words. Who knows who we will inspire or encourage to progress and who will thereby go on to make the most of their potential.

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There’s Always Another Forgotten Woman

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Athene Donald

It’s International Women’s Day and across the internet many stories will be spreading of amazing women – in science and in many other arenas – who either don’t, or haven’t, got the attention they deserve. The Royal Society is continuing its celebration of 80 years since the first women were elected FRS, as my previous blog alludes to, with a two-day conference this coming week. Additionally, a map is being constructed by them to identify locations associated with women in the history of STEM, to which anyone can add. There are the obvious names – Dorothy Hodgkin, Florence Nightingale, Ada Lovelace, all associated with London – appearing on this map, but it is time some of the less familiar ones got attention, and with a far wider geographic distribution. Many more names are appearing in stories and anecdotes on the web, of women whose contributions have been overlooked or claimed under the name of some man (the so-called Matilda Effect).

This year on IWD, I want to write about Ida Freund. In one sense I have known about her all my adult life, since I was awarded an Ida Freund Prize from Girton College as an undergraduate. Did I think about who she was? Not at all, women from the past held no interest for me at 20, I had my own life to worry about then. But, having just re-encountered her name, I realise what an interesting woman she was. Not just a woman in science at a time when that was rare, but also a foreign emigrée who had had a leg amputated in childhood, so someone living with a significant disability. Much more of a teacher than a researcher, she made significant impact on chemistry teaching in Cambridge and more widely.

Ida_Freund

Ida Freund (1863-1914) was born in Austria and came over to England in 1881 after the deaths of both her mother and grandmother, to be with her uncle as guardian. At the time, women’s education was still a contentious issue, but Girton College had been founded as a woman’s college in 1869 (and moved from Hitchin to its current location just outside Cambridge a few years later)  and she was enrolled there. Accounts imply she didn’t want to do this, although no explanation of why is given, but she obviously thrived there and went on to the Cambridge Training College for Women (now Hughes Hall) as a lecturer. From there she moved on to Newnham College where she spent the rest of her life, teaching chemistry to generations of students.

In those days, women were often excluded from the main university lectures (the male lecturers had to agree to their attendance) and the practical work for the women had to be done at Newnham, where a laboratory was created over which she ‘reigned supreme’. (I believe the Girton students also attended.) Women were allowed to sit the same exams as their male counterparts, but their names and classes were posted on a separate list and they were not allowed formally to proceed to degrees, thereby being denied the right to put BA after their name (no one, still, gets a BSc in Cambridge). This situation, it must shamefully be admitted, continued until 1948.

Ida Freund in labThe Newnham Lab in 1912, with Ida Freund sitting

Freund seems to have cut a strange figure. A letter from one of her students described her thus:

‘Miss Freund is the presiding genius, a jolly, stout German, whose clothes are falling in rags off her back. We made lots of horrible smells….’

Another said of her:

‘Miss Freund was a terror to the first-year student with her sharp rebuke for thoughtless mistake. One grew to love her as time went on, though we laughed at her emphatic and odd uses of English. Yet how brave she was trundling her crippled and, I am sure, often painful body about in her invalid chair smiling, urging, scolding us along….’

She never pursued a doctorate, or even very much of her own research, with a total of two papers to her name during her life. Teaching, however, was something she took extremely seriously. Her first textbook (The study of chemical composition: an account of its method and historical development with illustrative quotations) was published in 1904; her second (The experimental basis of chemistry: suggestions for a series of experiments illustrative of the fundamental principles of chemistry) was published posthumously in 1920. Her teaching seems to have been firmly rooted in experiment, but she also – as in her 1904 book – managed to discuss some quite cutting-edge ideas for the time, including sections on the electron (discovered in 1897 in Cambridge by JJ Thomson) and radioactivity (discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896 in Paris).

The theme of this year’s IWD is Give to Gain. So, what did Ida Freund give and who gained? Firstly, she gave the proceeds of a University Prize she won (the Gamble Prize in 1903 for an essay on the early history of the atomic theory), in part to Girton to create the fund from which I received my prize some seventy years later. There must have been generations of natural science students at the College who likewise benefitted from her generosity. Newnham also has an Ida Freund Memorial Prize. But perhaps there is another lasting legacy of hers we should celebrate her for, with a higher sugar content: periodic table iced cakes/cupcakes. This was a tradition she started, with clear pedagogical intent as well as a light-hearted character. One of her students described this:

‘In my year we were requested to go and make a further study of the ‘Periodic Table of the Elements’: We found a very large board with the Table set out. The division across and down were made with Edinburgh Rock, numbers were made of chocolate, and the elements were iced cakes each showing its name and atomic weight in icing. The nonvalent atoms were round, univalent had a protruding corner, bivalent two, trivalent triangular, and so on . We divided it up between us!’

Periodic Table cupcakes are of course still to be found in some locations with a chemical bent on celebratory occasions.

So, an early teacher of women chemists, who themselves no doubt trained many other women to go on and teach (or research) and who contributed to successive generations through her generosity. Certainly one of the many less well-known women who deserve to be remembered on this day, as on every other. Let us not forget those who forged a path for others of us to follow.

My sources for this blogpost, beyond Wikipedia, come from Chemistry was their Life, Marylene and Geoff Rayner-Canham, Imperial College Press 2008; and Ida Freund – Pioneer in Women’s Education in Chemistry, Margaret Hill and Alan Dronsfield, Education in Chemistry 2004 https://edu.rsc.org/download?ac=133519

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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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