Has ‘The Rising Tide’ of Women Risen?

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Athene Donald

Last December a new Government taskforce was launched to address issues about Women in Tech. Led by the Secretary of State at DSIT, Liz Kendall, with Anne-Marie Imafidon alongside, the aim is to ensure women will be better supported to enter, stay and lead in the UK’s tech sector. There is a long way to go. The Government press release cites a 2023 Fawcett Society Report which stated that 1 in 5 men working in tech roles believe that women are naturally less suited to working in the sector. Given potential male colleagues like that, why would women want to join the sector? Yet, the case for diversity in tech has been made many times, and losing women from the talent pool can only harm the nation and its decision-making. Who will worry about algorithmic bias or the dangers of stereotyping assumed within an LLM – by race, gender or any other characteristic? Who will think about female health concerns when setting up a new enterprise or be aware of the different products a diverse population might want? These are all topics I’ve written about before (see this policy brief I wrote last year).

Issues about the shortage of women in these arenas are not new, even if what ‘tech’ is may have moved on from the 90’s. Back then, Nancy Lane Perham – who died in November – led a group charged with looking into this issue on the back of William Waldegrave’s 1993 Realising Our Potential Report about the state of UK Science, Engineering and Technology (SET as it was called then, as opposed to the more modern STEM); her report was called The Rising Tide. I well remember the publication of the Waldegrave report (indeed he visited the Cavendish Laboratory during his time as Science minister, and we were very conscious of the hideous plastic buckets in my own lab designed to catch the leaks; it wasn’t necessarily the professional look we wanted to give). But reading it now does show how the world of women in STEM has and hasn’t moved on.

For instance, I was startled to read in the Waldegrave report that changes to the school curriculum will

‘ensure for the first time that all pupils, girls as well as boys, will study a broad and balance programme of science and technology right through to the age of 16.’

That it was necessary a decent science curriculum should be made available to girls as well as boys seems rather shocking now: this is an area where attitudes have certainly changed. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that girls may still be put off pursuing STEM subjects post-16 by attitudes from peers, parents and teachers, however talented they are. The presumption that computing and engineering are not for the female sex remains strong. As the Waldegrave report also made clear in the 1990’s,

‘Women are the country’s biggest single most under-valued and therefore under-used human resource’, with a ‘widespread waste of talent and training, throughout industry and academia, due to the absence of women.’

More than thirty years later, and we are still facing the same challenge.

Sadly, I have not been able to find Nancy Lane-Perham’s Report on the web. I probably once had a hard copy, but if I did it was thrown out when I vacated my office. I do have the successor report SET Fair on my computer, as well as still being able to find it on the web. Nancy was still associated with this, although Susan Greenfield chaired the report and it was often known as the Greenfield Report. Nancy was an absolute pioneer in raising these issues, actions that led nationally in due course to the creation of Athena SWAN (Senior Women in Academia Network) and ultimately the Athena SWAN Charter. In Cambridge Nancy spearheaded the formation of WiSETI, the Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Initiative, a programme that I assumed the leadership of when Nancy stepped down. By then I had known Nancy for many years: she was my graduate tutor at Girton (not that I had much interaction with her, although I suspect she organised a few end-of-year receptions where we mingled).

I was very conscious, when I assumed the role with WiSETI, that I, as a professor and an FRS, found it easier to get access to the senior leadership in the University than Nancy had. She never held a substantive post within the formal University structure, although she continued to do research throughout her life, funded by so-called soft money. This challenge she faced locally seemed particularly unreasonable given her external standing: she was, for instance, a non-executive director for one of the big pharmaceutical companies, and was honoured with several honorary degrees. I fear this casual attitude towards her by the local ‘establishment’ was exacerbated by the fact she was married to the biochemist Richard Perham and was too often seen as Richard’s wife rather than a scientist in her own right. When Richard became Master of St John’s College, this role as the Master’s wife probably further buried her own talents as a serious scientist. In some ways, therefore, her life story can be seen as typical of too many women, whose strengths are too often overlooked because they are ‘merely’ a woman, or someone’s wife.

Nancy was a woman whose energy was formidable, and who would continue to come to the annual WiSETI lectures, and check that I was keeping up the good fight locally long after she had retired. I have been thinking a lot about her life and work recently, after hearing the sad news of her recent deat. It therefore seems fitting to reflect on what has and hasn’t changed since she produced her ‘90’s report. Undoubtedly the numbers of senior women have increased, yet many will still be feeling they may be ‘othered’ or overlooked amidst a sea of white males. It is encouraging to see the Government’s initiative around the women in tech situation, but there is no point in only looking at the state of the workforce. We have to consider the messaging right back to the early years of children’s lives, to ensure the pipeline into tech is as diverse as possible, removing outdated messaging and stereotypes from the school. I am sure Nancy would hope her legacy will continue to have impact on both the young and more mature.

 

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Have We Had Enough of Experts?

Posted on December 21, 2025 by Athene Donald

Recently, my Cambridge colleagues Diane Coyle and Michael Kenny from the Bennett School of Public Policy took to the pages of Nature to write a cautionary Comment about the role of science and scientists in public policy. They are critical of those scientists who don’t pay attention to how to interact with policy-makers effectively, as opposed to simply baldly stating their views, data and/or evidence. Scientists must recognize, they say,

‘that the importance of science is not self-evident, and that part of the blame for the erosion of trust in science lies with scientists themselves.’

They go on to say:

‘In public policy, solutions to the problems society faces are rarely, if ever, purely technical. People’s values and interests often conflict, and scientific studies do not always provide direct answers to the questions that politicians and officials must grapple with, such as how to reduce crime rates or respond to a disease outbreak.’

There is nothing like working with policy-makers to ram this message home. As the saying goes ‘scientists advise and policy-makers decide’. Chairing science advisory committees, previously for DCMS and now for the Department for Education, clearly demonstrates to me any evidence that a scientist can bring to the table, however useful, correct and possibly even self-evident, can only inform. Many other factors, from ministerial direction to electoral acceptance, not to mention the fundamental issue of money, will need to be taken into account before any decision is made. But if we want the community of scientists to appreciate this, what action – other than writing in Nature – should be taken? If you are a PhD student, you may well be led to believe your thesis, all those results and the paper(s) you submit (and even see published) are the end of the story. In policy terms, that is not so.

Diane and Mike write of ‘science’ in the broadest sense (covered much more effectively by the German word Wissenschaft, as opposed to Naturwissenschaft; English does not have such a neat distinction), and I can really only talk as a ‘hard’ scientist, a natural philosopher if you like, not a social scientist, or indeed an engineer. But, although the details may vary, the basic issue is the same. Where, in training the scientists of tomorrow, do we introduce the idea that pure fact will not be sufficient to drive a policy. As it happens, a conversation with the head of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, Tim Minshall (he of the wonderful book, Your Life  is Manufactured), made very much the same point in a different context: the need to ensure a PhD thesis (from his field) considers not just the evidence, but  what impact it can and will have on (e.g) supply chains, scale-up or necessary skills.

In my field, the last chapter of a thesis is, typically, ‘suggestions for further work’. That covers no more than all those things the student might have wanted to do had they had another year or two of funding or the equipment had worked better, or indeed they had access to some other equipment. It would not typically address why the results had any bearing on our lives, potential government policy or saving money in production of some material. In my field, we don’t usually teach that stuff, but perhaps we should.

Turning briefly to a younger age group, the recent schools’ Curriculum and Assessment Review, with its mantra of ‘evolution not revolution’ remains wedded to standard assessments that focus on disciplinary facts, but does acknowledge there are other topics that need to be addressed, if not examined, within schools. One of these is climate change and sustainability – which one hopes has to cross disciplinary boundaries in the teaching – but a lot of material is to be crammed into (non-examinable) lessons in Citizenship and RSHE (Relationships and Sex Education, where issues around misogyny and toxic masculinity are likely to be touched upon, although I’ve already heard from some this is unlikely to be particularly productive).

In other words, in schools, some social issues will be taught but outside the main examinable curriculum, unless subject teachers find a way to bring them in. Should our university science departments be doing more of the same? It is obvious many, if not all, universities are running around trying to work out how to handle AI education and AI in education and assessment. But does every student get formally exposed to discussions around sustainability, for instance? I’m not sure they do. We don’t expect our students to be au fait with the environmental  challenges of extracting enough lithium from under the earth’s surface (be it from the Atacama Desert or China, which provoke different ecological issues) for the batteries we want for the energy transition, or to worry about the supply of rare-earth metals needed for our phones coming from fragile African states. As a physical scientist, all that is likely to be taught is how these components work.

Too often, we only teach facts that can be examined, not the issues that underlie those facts. We are unlikely to teach students to think about how to weigh up the pros and cons of the environmental plusses of moving towards a green economy reducing carbon emissions compared with the damage mining may do to a region. I’m aware many people reading this may think, well my department does, or that there is a specific ‘green energy’ module, but I fear too few actually discuss this wider context. Yet this is the context in which policy makers live, in which they have to weigh up pros and cons of any decision. These specific examples obviously come from the physical sciences, but one could raise the same sorts of questions in the life sciences.

Diane and Mike consider the impact of the growing polarisation of our society due to increasing inequality, the crude distinction between the haves and have-nots. They question whether the decisions – indeed the evidence – that ‘elite’ scientists seek and produce is, in itself, influenced by their status and not relevant to the more disadvantaged and that they may not listen to their views. That what counts as ‘evidence’ may need to be broadened to factor in what people know but which cannot easily be measured and quantified as well as their ‘tacit knowledge’. This is not a new idea (for instance, to give an early example, Brian Wynne has written a lot about this in the context of sheep farmers and the after effects of the Chernobyl disaster), but it is sadly easy to forget in many situations, although it won’t apply in all.

If we, as scientists, want our work to have impact in the way our society operates – be it about the mass take-up of vaccinations or achieving a just green energy transition – we all have work to do to think harder about how we communicate and contextualise what we do, and indeed which questions we ask. Every field will have different challenges in achieving this and it is not to say ‘pure’ curiosity driven research has no place. In our teaching, in our communications to the public (as opposed to within our own communities) we should remember the plea from Coyle and Kenney. We can each do our own bit to remind the wider world they really haven’t had enough of experts.

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Practice and Experience

Posted on December 14, 2025 by Athene Donald

It seems appropriate in this 250th anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth to use a quote from Pride and Prejudice to kickstart this post. ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.’ says Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The idea that one is naturally talented and would have been brilliant if only one had put in the time is a very attractive one. The idea that, if one started learning something, great things would have transpired; yes we can all see the attraction of that. But nothing happens without effort and, although – in the case of music that Lady Catherine was referring to – some of us may have larger hands or longer fingers making certain chords easier than for the average member of the public – the reality is, one will never be proficient let alone brilliant without putting in the hours.

I am rediscovering the tedium of practice as I attempt to pick up my piano playing 50+ years after I last had a lesson. And, as I only had lessons for two or three years, I was never much good anyhow. However, it is part of trying to rediscover the things that used to give me joy before science completely took over my life. I’ve written before about the piano I originally learned on, which is now far away so my granddaughters can learn to play on it. Currently I’m renting an e-piano to see if my elderly limbs can cope with the stretches required to play octaves and so on, given I’ve had problems with one of my wrists since teenage years.

However, the point of this post, is not to wax lyrical about musical recreation, but to remember that nothing comes easily. I’ve never forgotten the moment I realised that, just because I had a first-class degree from Cambridge, it didn’t actually mean I knew very much about Physics at all. It is easy to think that passing an exam or ticking off some other milestone means you’re transformed from novice to expert in a moment. Life – and knowledge – sadly does not work like that. Nothing can be accomplished without putting in the hours, and you never know whether the challenge is one that you are mentally or physically capable of mastering until you try. Think of all the aspiring ballet dancers who, regardless of talent, were turned away from a career because they were too tall or heavy; they were not ‘suited’. But we all have brains or bodies that work better in some directions than others. Why I could never remember the basic facts, let alone the intricacies of NMR and MRI, I never fathomed. But despite reading the topic up multiple times (I seemed to be asked to examine an inordinate number of PhD theses involving the technique), the facts always failed to stick. No doubt something fundamental in my brain wiring, or perhaps merely a lack of real application.

However, being an expert takes multiple forms. I worry that, when it comes to our schools, we are still cramming our children with facts – because these are the easiest to test in, say, a GCSE – rather than teaching them how to use the facts in unfamiliar situations, which will largely be what the world of work for them requires. We know children will have easy access to ‘facts’ (as well as misinformation) on the web, and be likely to use LLMs, whether or not they have a good sense of how to get the most out of them and spot a hallucination when they see it. The Royal Society wants to see a very different emphasis on mathematical, digital and data education in our schools – for all, not just for those who wish to pursue a more formal route into computing or mathematics – and to help students with AI literacy, again for all students. The skills the next generation need are not simply about memorising facts, and both what is taught and how it is examined need to be kept up to date. The recent Curriculum and Assessment Review had surprisingly little to say about the actual assessments themselves, so we are likely to see little transformation from what strikes me as the Victorian ideal of knowing and testing facts, to using them wisely.

Knowing how to approach problems, where to go for the necessary facts – even knowing which are the necessary facts – are a crucial part of solving anything, but remembering their details may not be the important thing. Knowing which questions to ask, without necessarily being particularly expert in a field, is a great skill. I expect most of us have encountered the professor (I knew at least a couple) who would appear to snooze through a seminar and then ask the killer question. Often prefaced with the humble ‘I may have missed this’ or ‘perhaps I misunderstood’, but usually leaving the speaker looking a bit foolish. Maybe there was an implicit assumption lurking underneath the analysis that the professor has spotted. Maybe they see an analogy with another field where they are expert and feel that the speaker has missed a trick by not looking there for understanding. Knowing what questions to ask is a skill every bit as important as knowing the facts that can easily be tracked down. Do we teach our students – of whatever age – enough about this? Are we moving on from regurgitating facts to knowing how to use and manipulate data?

As a scientist I believe I am capable of critical thinking, which this is one aspect of, as well as be creative, both skills the arts and humanities folk sometimes seem to want to claim as if they are a race apart from scientists. We all need these skills, although obviously creativity may manifest itself in different ways across the disciplines. Memorising and reproducing the second law of thermodynamics (to replicate CP Snow’s arguments) or knowing how to use Excel can indeed be demonstrated by a simple and easily marked test. But mastering more subtle skills of expertise, for instance to carry out analysis in an unfamiliar situation, is more challenging. Like a musical instrument, it takes time, practice and experience.

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What Voice?

Posted on December 7, 2025 by Athene Donald

It is more than 40 years since the American psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote her book, In a Different Voice, challenging the view that women were morally less developed than men, pointing out this difference arose because the schema had been developed from studies on (white) males. According to Gilligan’s analysis, women are more centred around caring whereas men prioritise justice. It has been criticised as reinforcing stereotypes and treating ‘women’ (and ‘men’) as homogeneous, regardless of other characteristics such as ethnicity, age or socio-economic status. It also begs the question – present in so many of these debates around gender issues – of whether there is an innate biological difference or simply the way we bring up our children that creates this difference. It is the nature versus nurture debate once more.

When I first read it, maybe 15 years ago, the book certainly resonated with me in terms of how I viewed my life and my place in it. It isn’t clear to me that, in a situation like this, the origin of any difference in the way men and women approach problems (one of Gilligan’s earliest studies was around attitudes to abortion) is relevant. What matters is that, in many situations, women and men may approach or envisage problems differently. In talks I give about women in STEM, I cite the word clouds Let Toys be Toys produced about toys for children. Those toys marketed at boys (specifically 4-8 year olds) stress words like ‘battle’ and ‘power’, whereas girls were directed towards ‘magic’ and ‘glitter’, with ‘beautiful’ being another oft-appearing word thrown in. It is hard to imagine children don’t receive messages from these words, at least at some subliminal level.

Historically, of course, women ‘knew their place’, and in the science community that meant that a rare woman had to tread carefully if she was to be heard and not shunned. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, eschewed such actions, and therefore got tarred with labels such as Mad Madge, and more comments about her dress, when she visited the Royal Society in 1667, than her thinking (which Samuel Pepys swiftly dismissed: ’nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing’) . Caroline Herschel was much more careful, even – or perhaps particularly – when writing to the secretary of the Royal Society to inform him she had discovered a new comet (the first of seven she laid claim to). As she put it

‘In consequence of the Friendship I know to exist between you and my brother I venture to trouble you in his absence with the following imperfect account of a comet..’ ,

a suitably modest way of daring to break into what was then solely a male preserve, and invoking her famous, if absent, brother to demonstrate her credentials. It is a very self-effacing introduction, while equally being forthright about the claim she is making, even without her brother looking over her shoulder.

We may have got beyond the need for women to be quite so modest, but nevertheless most successful women know they always have a fine line to walk between being seen as assertive and aggressive, between bigging oneself up and being seen as a threat to the establishment, primarily male, or coming across as overtly ambitious (not a trait that is seen as attractive in most women). But this difference in approach manifests itself in many ways.

Take Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna writing in the introduction to Venki Ramakrishnan’s 2018 book Gene Machine. This is a book in which he discusses his life and how he succeeded in unravelling the structure of the ribosome, the work for which he won the Nobel Prize, rushing along in order to beat others chasing the same prize. She says ‘the story is one of professional dilemmas, the serendipity of discovery and the deeply human nature of research, in which personalities play a central role.’ These sentences stress the interpersonal challenges everyone faces and the book discusses how they were tackled. In contrast, journalist Roger Highfield is quoted as saying of the book ‘this exhilarating account of the race to understand the molecular machine …..’ conjuring up an image of competition and individualism. Back to battle and power of the boy’s toy’s ads for Roger. Of course, both descriptions are right, but the emphasis is very different between them. Whether their different takes on identically the same book (and person) reflect nature or nurture isn’t the point. The fact is, what they see as the key takeaways are very different. An illustrative single data point to ponder.

I believe a key challenge for our (western) society, in science or other professions, is that the presumption remains that the male norm is the norm. Increasingly backwards-facing attitudes to DEI initiatives will not help this change.  How many young female scientists still feel a need to be understated, if not positively self-effacing, in case the males around them have their egos upset because the women are being ‘unwomanly’? How many of the men notice and try to encourage the women, rather than stamp on them? Clearly, stereotypes being the dangerous things they are, some women will be the ones doing the stamping and some men doing all they can to encourage the women. So, yes, ‘not all men’ believe in the importance of battle and power in our laboratories – or offices, or law chambers or wherever. But nevertheless, quite a few.

The question of ‘what voice’ should a woman use, however, to be most persuasive or most successful remains. Having had a supportive colleague once ask me if I’d thought of having voice coaching lessons to lower my voice (think Maggie Thatcher), in some senses I mean literally ‘what voice’ as well as what words to use. But there is also the of ‘what voice’ in terms of what sits centre stage: it could be a change from an  active to a  passive voice in the narrative, but it could also be a change in the dynamics of the narrative from – as the Doudna/Highfield example shows – one reflecting people to one reflecting power or control. Unfortunately, unless we change the subtle cues children receive from everything (including advertisements, but also all kinds of media) and everyone (parents, teachers and peers) around them, this delicate dance that women often feel obliged to execute will have to continue. It can be very exhausting.

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Botanists in the Family

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Athene Donald

It is difficult to know where to begin with this post, since several strands have got intertwined. I guess the prompt for this is, as with my last post, the meeting at the Royal Society celebrating women from the past who, whether or not they would have identified themselves as scientists/natural philosophers, certainly got involved with the scientific endeavour and made significant contributions. I did intend to write about Margaret Cavendish, but that will have to wait, as I’ve disappeared down a genealogical rabbit hole. This was prompted by seeing the name Francis Boott on one of the slides, I think certifying some botanical specimen. Francis Boott (1792-1863) was American by birth, a secretary to the Linnean Society, a physician in whose London house the first recorded use of an anaesthetic for a dental procedure was recorded – and (if I’ve got my generations right), my great, great, great grandfather. His mother-in-law was Derby-based Lucy Hardcastle (1771-1834), a botanist of some distinction and acquaintance of Erasmus Darwin (one of my heroes, as a polymath) and, more particularly, his two illegitimate daughters. It is not for nothing that my grandmother’s middle name was the otherwise bizarre choice of Hardcastle.

Lucy Hardcastle befriended Francis Boott when he was on an extended stay in Britain and, after a family disagreement when he went back to the USA, he continued his interactions with her upon his permanent return to this country. In due course he married Lucy’s daughter Mary and they moved to London. Through his introduction, Hardcastle started a correspondence with Sir James Edward Smith, a leading botanist of the day and the founder of the Linnean Society. She did many delicate drawings of plants and in 1830 she published a book about Linnean classification. Whereas her acquaintance Erasmus Darwin wrote a long poem in rhyming couplets on the same theme entitled The Loves of the Plants (1789), when Hardcastle wrote her book she carefully avoided the use of the words male, female and sex, no doubt feeling such words were inappropriate for a woman (particularly one who ran a school for girls), although the sexual parts of the plants were clear in her illustrations. I learned all this and much more from a fairly recent pamphlet about her life, The Rediscovery of Lucy Hardcastle, written by Jonathan and Anne Powers, available through the Derby Museum.[1] This museum holds a number of her drawings and letters. All this I have picked up in the last couple of weeks since the Royal Society event.

Lucy Hardcastle, Capsula, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons, London, 1830, p. 75.

Lucy Hardcastle, An Introduction to the Elements of the Linnaean System of Botany, for Young Persons (London: Thomas Richardson, 1830)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But then, in trying to work out quite how many generations I needed to go back to get to Lucy Hardcastle, I fell into another rabbit hole concerning another botanical relative, or perhaps more precisely, a well-known Victorian gardener: the Reverend Charles Wolley Dod (1826-1904), who was my great great grandfather and whose son Francis married Lucy Hardcastle’s great granddaughter, Annette Mary Clarke. The genealogy is a nightmare to disentangle because, in the way of Victorian families which ran out of male heirs, surnames got changed along the route, and often the same first names were recycled. My reading is that the Rev Charles was born Charles Hurt, married Mary Wolley who then became Wolley Dod upon the death of the relevant male heirs. The Rev Charles then changed his name formally to Wolley Dod in 1868 and in 1877 acceded to the family estate in Cheshire. Up till then he had been a Master at Eton, but thereafter he could use the gardens around the Hall to experiment and breed new varieties. He interacted with the eminent gardener Gertrude Jekyll who said of him:

‘of all these friendly gardeners, the one whom I felt to be the most valuable was Rev C.  Wolley Dod, scholar, botanist and great English gentleman; an enthusiast for plant life; an experienced gardener; and the kindest of instructors.’

(quoted in Huntia). He is depicted in one of the south nave aisle’s stained glass windows of Liverpool Cathedral.

Coming full circle to the Royal Society event, that same Huntia article says how Ellen Willmott, would stay with the Wolley Dod’s and use the Rev Charles as an advisor. Ellen Willmott (1858-1934) was one of the many women discussed at the Royal Society, covering her role in financing botanical explorations and the importance of the role she played in a widespread network of collectors. She was identified as a central node in such network analysis, with a huge circle of correspondents. She used her family money to employ over one hundred gardeners at her home as well as covering the costs of international teams seeking new plants. Wilmott was able to penetrate the scientific establishment, becoming one of the first women fellows of the Linnean Society.

None of this has any bearing on why I was enthusiastic about science at school. I vaguely knew about the Rev Charles Wolley Dod, because we had a rose in our small garden referred to as the Wolley Dod rose, but he was never described to me as a biologist (after all, he wasn’t one, although he carried out a lot of plant breeding). And, despite my ornithological inclinations I was put off biology at school anyhow by a formidable teacher as much as by the then curriculum. But it is interesting to see these different strands come together, all prompted by attending an event celebrating 80 years since the election of the first women to the Royal Society – and thereafter making extensive use of the web to track down relationships.

[1] For what it’s worth, this pamphlet debunks the story in Desmond King Hele’s life of Erasmus Darwin, where he suggests – based on correspondence between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton – that Lucy Hardcastle (née Swift) was actually a third illegitimate daughter of Erasmus. Sadly, therefore, I must conclude I am no descendant of his!

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