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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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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