Mrs Handley and the Whippets (Learning to be Difficult)

Posted on October 19, 2025 by Athene Donald

No, not the name of a pop-group (although it might be quite a good one), but an episode from my early life. In later life I’m sure people had me in the category of those difficult women I wrote about last week, but by and large at school I was a goody-goody who (as my mother continued to say long after I’d become a professor) couldn’t say boo to a goose. I was, in general, not one for breaking school rules, unlike those who will remain nameless who put potassium permanganate in our school’s water tank, or who were constantly disruptive in the classroom. However, just occasionally, I found the backbone to tackle what I thought was unfair behaviour on the part of the teaching staff. The occasion with Mrs Handley and her whippets was one such occasion.

Carol Handley was, at the time, deputy head of my secondary school, Camden School for Girls. She later became Head of the School before retiring to Cambridge (sadly, I never met her in the city, and only discovered around the time of her death that she had been a Fellow at Wolfson College. Her husband, Eric Handley, had been the Regius Professor of Greek). She taught classics, although she never taught me.

The episode I’m referring to occurred one day in May many years ago when many of us, so-called fifth years, were about to take our O Levels (the GCSE’s of the day). We were feeling disgruntled. We had just been told we would not, as was the norm and as we had expected, be able to revise at home between our different exams but would have to come into school for lessons. I was clearly not the only one who felt very put out by this announcement. I suspect, being the nerdy swot I was (think of how Hermione Granger tackled revision), I probably had a neatly drawn up schedule of when I would revise what: the need to be sure I knew the appropriate chemical reactions and could tell a gerund from a gerundive (neither of which I would like to be tested on now). My diary of the time simply says ‘we got all the 5th formers together’ and went to see Mrs Handley.

All the 5th formers would have been approaching a hundred pupils, so I’m sure that’s an overstatement but still, a lot of us went find her in some classroom, and my memory is that I was the ring-leader, although that’s not written down precisely in my childish script. With her was – unusually, I don’t ever recall another appearance of a dog in the school – a sick whippet, which clearly was too ill to have been left at home and was sitting in a small basket on the desk at the front of the class (I suspect both her whippets were involved, but only one was unwell). We argued the case to her that we would all accomplish more revision quietly by ourselves at home, rather than dragging ourselves into the school for a teacher to decide collectively what we were in most need of thinking about. My diary notes ‘she is on our side now’.

However, the next time we saw our form teacher she was livid. (Incidentally, she was also a classicist, although again not one who taught me; we must have had a lot of Latin teachers in our school at the time, given everyone did Latin from arriving at the school at 11, although I think doing it at O Level probably wasn’t compulsory). ‘Irresponsible’ she said, particularly given the sick whippet. Why the latter was relevant I’m not sure, since we did it no harm, were not rowdy and did not shout. Nor did it seem to bother Mrs Handley at the time, but apparently by this point the furore had escalated to the head teacher, Doris Burchell (head 1946-68), who was now ‘against us’.

A couple of days later, a suitable compromise was found: we didn’t get the full time away from school we’d initially expected, but we got three more days than the interim plan had proposed. I suppose everyone could feel they’d won. I never felt Mrs Handley held this against me – in due course she was extremely helpful to me in a very different situation, but that’s not my story to tell. I’m sure I felt we, collectively, had done the right thing and that gathering everyone together to put our case calmly and on good didactic grounds had been totally responsible, despite what our form teacher claimed.

I’m not sure if that encouraged me to become stroppier. On the whole I continued in my nerdish way, but the next year I had occasion to make a different fuss which had zero didactic basis. I felt, in this episode, the school was being unfair and unreasonable and I took them to task over what felt like the illogicality of their position. These school-years of mine were at the height of the mini-skirt craze, and the school had rules about what length our skirts (no trousers; such a thing was never even considered) our uniform had to be. I can’t remember what the answer was, I didn’t have either the thighs or the daring to go for the shortest of skirts, but it was clear they thought longer was better. However, when I and one other girl turned up in a maxi coat, essentially floor length, this was deemed unsuitable and ‘against the rules’.

By this point I was in the sixth form doing A Levels, and we didn’t have to wear uniform at all, so that in the first instance this felt a bit odd anyhow. However, I can imagine on health and safety grounds (although such a phrase was not in common parlance back then), long skirts in a lab – where of course I spent quite a lot of my time – might have been thought a hazard. But this was a coat, worn solely to get me to and from school. What risk was there in that? What rule were they suddenly inventing to stop me wearing this coat I was so proud of? (I was so proud of it, I loved it dearly, that I only got rid of it a few years ago once the moths had had a good chew, although I rarely wore it in the relatively recent past). I argued the toss – and won. This felt like a jobsworth kind of unconsidered reaction to something unexpected, and I think they swiftly realised that they did not have a leg to stand on.

So, despite my mother’s attestations to my teenage son that I couldn’t say boo to a goose, at least until my 20’s, that clearly wasn’t quite accurate. Push me too far and I could be forceful. That does not mean that I take kindly to the phrase, said to me all too often, that I’m ‘not a shrinking violet’. Both my last two posts touch on the words and phrased directed at women in pejorative tones, and my (and I suspect many women’s) dislike of phrases such as that, or being described as feisty was raised in many of my conversations at the WISE conference. Being a forceful woman (not aggressive, just assertive) is a perfectly fine way to act. As a teenager I was just practicing, and probably not often enough.

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Difficult Women

Posted on October 12, 2025 by Athene Donald

Behave Badly Pin Badge – Curating Cambridge

Tributes poured in following the death of Jane Goodall, with stories of her remarkable life and doings, the way she set out new paths in research and lived a different kind of life. The quoted remark of hers that most struck me was

“It doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.”,

although there has subsequently been a debunking of the attribution. Nevertheless, I suspect that it is in the spirit of things she might have said, given interviews of her I have seen.

For me, that first sentence certainly rings true. Although few men of my acquaintance would admit to the fact they like women to know their place quietly in the background, I nevertheless think somehow that’s what many men around the world expect. It is just one aspect of that pernicious habit we all have of stereotyping. The trad wife may be having something of a revival, at least on the other side of the Atlantic, but will be little seen in academia: you’re not going to survive long in the cut-and-thrust world of research if you choose to fade into the background and merely bring in the cakes for celebratory teas. But there may still be an expected element of ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’ said to the head of a team (who is statistically likely to be male), still, in almost all scientific disciplines.

There are a number of other notable women who have made this same point about being difficult in different spheres, probably far more than I know of and covering centuries. Let me just give a few not-so-distant examples. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a Harvard Professor of early American history, who used the phrase ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ in an article she wrote, back in 1976. The phrase took on a life of its own, according to her, and she subsequently expanded on it in her book of the same title. In 2019 she reflected on this in a fascinating essay, casting the sentiment back to a poem published by Anne Bradstreet in 1650 (published in London, although she was a colonialist New England poet). Bradstreet wrote:

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, …..

In other words, get back to your sewing, woman.

Moving forward to a period I lived through, let me highlight another woman, like Jane Goodall, sadly missed, Lisa Jardine. I only met her a couple of times, but she was another force of nature who, when she became the first female fellow at Jesus College in Cambridge in 1976, created badges which said ‘behave badly’. These she would give out to colleagues, such as Jane Tillier, the first woman Lay Chaplain to be appointed at the College in 1984, exhorting them not to go about their business quietly.

Of course, in our current political world, there is the example of Jess Phillips, famously pugnacious, who says of herself

‘I’m tough in most situations and I’m not afraid to speak back at people if they’re having a pop at me.’

And lots of people do have a pop at her. As she puts this in a chilling comparison with domestic abuse ‘

What happens is there’s a slow and steady buildup to control a woman – you have to be very negative about them, bring them down, groom them to a position of weakness, isolate them from people by threatening to embarrass them at work. You close them in, and then when all those bits of control are done, you escalate to violence.’

Intersectionality, as ever, makes all of this much worse with the well-worn trope Angry Black Woman particularly prevalent in the USA, with such women considered to be  ‘hostile, aggressive, overbearing, illogical, ill-tempered and bitter.’

No, women just want to be allowed to speak up without fear – but with good sense. Whether in science or anywhere else, our voices need to be heard and listened to, not treated as if we are out of line for daring to open our mouths. Too often women are spoken over, ignored or slapped down. Still. That this is ongoing was apparent from my conversations with younger women at the recent WISE conference, who were all too familiar with the sensation of men around them who weren’t necessarily willing to listen. Who might additionally mark a woman down for speaking up. I fear, if the ructions in the USA spread over here, those sensations may only grow.

Apart from the potential of damaging one’s career, speaking up in the face of negativity or worse, can be extremely tiring. There are times when any fighter, in any situation, may prefer to go and hide in a corner and nurse their wounds. It takes energy from the day job, such as research or teaching. It takes time away from the actions that might lead to progression, be it writing papers or attending conferences. By fighting one’s corner there are many ways in which one’s career may be jeopardised, or at the very least hindered. But if we don’t speak up, then nothing will change. I know I have the luxury of no longer having a career to worry about, but Lisa Jardine did not when she was first elected as a junior research fellow all those years ago. By encouraging others, as well as herself, to ‘behave badly’, she paved the way for all the women research fellows who came later to have a voice and a status.

Many of us will be marked down as ‘difficult’, or indeed as feisty, not a shrinking violet, unpredictable, outspoken – at this point you should insert your own particular bête noire phrase, because most readers will know what gets under their skin if they speak up. This, of course, can happen to men too, but somehow the vocabulary is usually different, with words like feisty rarely applied to a man. It may not inherently be pejorative but, when tossed in my direction, I have always felt that was the message conveyed. However, being difficult is, too often, the only way for change to happen. The parsing of ‘women are aggressive while men are assertive’ may linger under so much of this, but that’s not a reason to stop putting one’s case without fear.

 

 

 

 

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Being WISE

Posted on October 5, 2025 by Athene Donald

When I set off for University, I wasn’t surprised to find there weren’t many women on my course: there were only three Cambridge colleges that admitted women back then (i.e. no coeducational colleges at all), so of course I would be in a tiny minority. That recognition that I was the only woman in the room – for instance in an undergraduate practical class – was only to be expected. However, at the WISE Conference I attended this week, it was dismal to hear that for some women that still seemed to be their experience at work. Unlike many of the talks I have given on the subject of women in STEM, the audience here were largely engineers in industry, but their experiences seem disappointingly similar.

 WISE Conference 2025 - WISE

One panel discussion opened up this topic: how do you cope with that sense of difference in the room? The answers seemed to align with my own strategy of using it as a superpower (albeit that’s not a phrase I’ve ever personally used), by stressing that people will remember you over the bunch of identikit men, so you should use that difference to your advantage. I’ve written previously about how I’ve given up worrying about my dress causing me to stick out, but, instead, likewise use it to my advantage. Typically, this has led me – consciously or otherwise – to choose something red, although not on this occasion, when I was in a much more sober hue.

But using difference as a superpower still costs personal energy, and sometimes the cost is too great. Watching others in your organisation flourish while your own career stagnates for reasons that look suspiciously like bias, can be painful. Being expected to do the legwork, yet not get the credit or benefit from the resulting positive outcomes can lead to any worker wondering why they are sticking around. On the first panel discussion it was clear all three women (Lucy Davies, Lily Davies-Dobbs and Mamta Singhal) had thought about leaving a position because, basically, they’d had enough. Possibly if you had a panel of three men discussing their lot in life you might get the same result, but possibly not for the same reasons: of being passed over, ignored and not treated seriously.

To me, at my stage in life (viz: retired), it is depressing to realise that things may have moved on, but not nearly far enough. There are so many ways that women can feel excluded and overlooked for reasons that don’t seem legitimate. I was once given the advice, by an extremely supportive colleague, to get voice-coaching lessons to drop my voice. It may have worked for Maggie Thatcher – or at least she thought it would – but I deplore an attitude that suggests nonsense spoken in a low, gravelly voice is worth more than sense uttered in a typical female voice. Of course, I’m assuming I do talk sense when I make that rebuttal, but the fact remains the timbre of one’s voice should have nothing to do with whether or not one is listened to. I’m sure those who speak with a regional or foreign accent may feel a similar sense of disadvantage (see the reports of how class amongst undergraduate students rears its ugly head due to the ‘wrong’ sort of accent, in this case creating an apparently toxic atmosphere at the University of Durham).

But, to feel that one has to leave an organisation because its culture is toxic is such a waste, but may be necessary for one’s wellbeing. When I found Cambridge becoming toxic to me, I thought hard about leaving. My friends encouraged me to seek pastures new because it was getting painful and sapping my energy. But – and I remember writing a letter to this effect to one of these friends very clearly – I felt if I left, I would be letting the next generations of women down. Here I was, a professor and an FRS, what message would I be giving the early career women by quitting? So I stayed, in due course in 2010 (although in an almost accidental way) I became the University’s Gender Equality Champion and so was able to have some influence on the culture. In my case I’m certainly glad I stuck it out, but everyone has to make their own decisions.

One key message I personally took away from the WISE event, was not to be apologetic (although I’m ‘sorry’ to say, I can’t remember which of the three panellists I mention above offered this particular piece of advice). How often I – and I’m sure many of my readers – have started a conversation or an email with an apology. I’m sorry to disturb you, I’m sorry if I’ve misunderstood you, I’m sorry this email is a slow response….there are so many variants of the apology. Sheryl Sandberg may have started ‘ban bossy’, but I think a movement to stop unnecessary apologies would also be helpful for women in STEM. The need to reject bossy from the (male) lexicon of our world, of course, must remain a goal too.

It was heartening to see so many women come together to share experiences, both good and bad, and to reinforce their determination to continue to fight the good fight in the world of women in STEM.

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Honouring Sir Richard Friend

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Athene Donald

I’m essentially a year into retirement and, being the age I am, it is not surprising that I get invited to attend other people’s retirement celebrations. Of course, not all academics want such an event in their honour, and for some it is hard to know when retirement actually happens, now few universities in this country still have a formal retiring age: some professors may want just to work more flexibly or part-time, rather than hang up their boots completely.

Last week it was the turn of Sir Richard Friend to be the subject of such an event, although he is most certainly not stopping doing his research. Under Cambridge’s then rules, he had to give up holding the Cavendish Chair (the senior chair in my department, the Cavendish Laboratory) in 2020, but he continues to hold grants and supervise students as a Director of Research. Richard and I are exact contemporaries, meeting for the first time just before our undergraduate lectures began and subsequently (after we each spent a few years abroad) long-term colleagues and sometimes collaborators. We co-authored a handful of papers together, although none recently.

A day long symposium was held in his honour. It was extremely well attended, with ex-group members coming from around the world. He has trained up many PhD students who have gone on to have fantastic careers in Europe and the USA in particular, as well as in this country.

But how do you give a talk to honour a man of such stature? At my own retirement conference, much was said about impostor syndrome, which Richard (if I recall correctly) admitted to suffering from himself when he spoke there. The topic did not arise at this recent event. The talks ranged from the purely scientific, with just a nod towards how Richard had influenced or supported them, to much more personal talks. There were frequent references, at least shown photographically, about the winter schools his group went on in places where skiing fitted into the agenda too. So, we had multiple photos of Richard looking suitably tanned, relaxed and begoggled, with snow in the background.

Of course, much was also said about the science underlying generations of the novel materials – their chemistry and their microstructure – of devices and potential devices developed in the group. No doubt Richard, like every other scientist, might have wanted more papers, more citations and more funding. Perhaps in his case he would also have preferred to have more patents and more companies to his name – surprisingly little was said about the companies he set up during the symposium. For many years he was a rare example, certainly in the Cavendish, of a scientist who was also entrepreneurial and set up spin-outs from his work which thrived for many years before being bought up by industrial giants, or the technology licensed to such companies. He was proof that you could do cutting-edge science and get stuck in what at the time (early 1990’s) was still being seen as the dirty world of patents and entrepreneurship. He was publicly lauded, although I’m sure many of my colleagues continued to wonder secretly about the legitimacy of doing this as an academic physicist.

I recall, before his first company CDT became a reality, how he quietly mentioned to me over a cup of tea in the Cavendish canteen, that he and Jeremy Burroughes had seen photoluminescence in a test tube from a solution of one of the new conducting polymers they were studying. He had to say this very quietly, and swear me to secrecy, because this would have been before the first patent was filed in 1989. But the lighting up of the test-tube was obviously matched by the lighting up of his eyes as he grasped the significance of this observation. Jeremy went on to become CDTs Chief Technology Officer, a role he has held for many years.

Richard’s science has been massively significant – and quantifiable. He knows how many prizes and other honours he has received. So, I wonder if actually he got more pleasure on the day, because less usually voiced, from the plaudits describing his humanity: his mentoring and nurturing of generations of students and postdocs (as an example see the text in this photo, alongside generations of Cavendish professors).

RHF and Cavendish professors

Five Cavendish Professors: a younger Richard (top left, 1995-2020), probably at his election to the Chair, standing alongside Sir Sam Edwards (1984-1995); sitting, Sir Nevill Mott (1954-71) and Sir Brian Pippard ((1971-84). The painting behind is of the first Cavendish Professor, James Clerk Maxwell and his wife, although the reflection makes it hard to see them.

Every researcher is impacted by those around them for good or ill. Sadly, it is too often for ill, when a student meets a bully or an unsupportive supervisor who never encourages their first faltering steps. Too often in that case, those steps may also be the last academic steps that that researcher takes. However, multiple times during the day speakers highlighted the help they had received in order to progress, and the kindness and generosity they had benefitted from. It isn’t that Richard couldn’t lose his temper, and he certainly had feuds with senior scientists who he felt had got the wrong end of the stick or who had otherwise stepped out of line, but there is a difference in tearing a strip off a research student and your peers. The latter should be able to defend themselves, the former much less so, as I have frequently voiced here.

The tributes to Richard were many and heartfelt, and I heard more stories in the margins of the meetings to add to those formally expressed. In the past, during my time championing women in the sciences in the university, I heard similar stories from women comparing their time working in the Cavendish’s Optoelectronics group spearheaded by Richard, with other places they had gone on to work. In one case they found this comparison with their then department (where they held a fellowship) in another university, so upsetting they burst into tears.

We need leaders who are humane, as well as brilliant and entrepreneurial, and Richard has shone on all fronts. I hope he enjoyed this symposium in his honour.

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Science Education, Disadvantage and Teacher Burn-out

Posted on September 20, 2025 by Athene Donald

While we wait for the Schools White Paper and the report of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, other bodies have been busy, reporting specifically on the state of science education in (predominantly) English schools. Over the last few months, both the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the Institute of Physics (IOP) have produced significant reports looking at the, not entirely happy, state of the teaching profession. The annual report from the Royal Society of Chemistry, brought together responses from nearly 2000 science teachers in their Science Teaching Survey. The Institute of Physics report, The Physics teacher shortage and addressing it through the 3R’s: retention, recruitment and retraining (England), focussed on the need for more specialist physicist teachers and ways to counter the loss of so many teachers during the first five years on the job. Their recommendations, although directed at Physics, will apply across the sciences more generally.

The shortage of Physics teachers is of long-standing and is certainly not improving. What this means is that the subject is often taught by non-specialists, certainly up to GCSE. Science teachers are frequently just that: in terms of how a school uses them, they are often seen as interchangeable between disciplines, something that is convenient not least for timetabling purposes.  When the RSC refers to science teachers, they are not distinguishing between those with different specialisms. When it comes to teaching Combined Science, a school does not even have to record this as non-specialist teaching. Yet the IOP’s report shows clear evidence that the fewer specialist Physics teachers (naturally, their area of focus) a school has, the lower the progression rate to A Level Physics. Whether this applies to Chemistry and Biology hasn’t been studied in the same way, but with (according to the IOP) around half of science teachers being biology specialists, this may be less of a problem, for that subject at least.

The IOP go on to highlight that science teachers end up with a very heavy teaching load. As one recently qualified teacher with a Physics background, working in a severely disadvantaged area, put it to me:

I have to prepare lessons each week covering all three subjects for each year group whereas other subjects (e.g. computer science) only prepare a single lesson for each year group each week.

This person was not best pleased to have to teach GCSE biology because they felt they themselves were weak in the subject. Furthermore, they pointed out that some of the people they had trained with were ‘scared’ of physics (coming from chemistry or biology backgrounds) and might well be passing that fear on to their students.

As the IOP points out, significantly more early career Physics teachers leave the profession within the first five years of qualification than the overall average rate, and this requirement to prepare so many lessons, many of which will lie outside their area of expertise, will be a key factor. (Salary may be another, as Physics graduates are often much in demand in highly-paid sectors.) The IOP recommend a different approach to the utilisation of teachers, in which early career teachers teach simply within their specialism, while they get to grips with all the other demands a teaching career places on them. Furthermore, in order to make best use of the Physics specialists they do have, they want to see the sciences treated explicitly as three separate sciences, taught by specialists, at KS4 (i.e the two years up to GCSE). Their report has many other (costed) recommendations, demonstrating that if more Physics teachers could be supported to stay in the profession, over ten years the long running deficit of Physics teachers could be wiped out at a very moderate cost.

Another aspect of science teachers’ heavy workload is highlighted in the RSC report, namely the shortage of technicians to assist with practical work, as well as insufficient funding to buy the necessary equipment and consumables to make practical work feasible, alongside the more general shortage of cash across any given school.  This under-resourcing of laboratory work means little opportunity to excite young people with hands-on experience. In the most recent Science Education Tracker, published by the Royal Society, the analysis showed:

Reduced frequency of hands–on practical work was accompanied by rising levels of unmet demand for this: 68% of year 10–11 students wanted to do more practical work.

This is a real issue when it comes to inspiring students to consider future careers in STEM, since this same Royal Society report showed how practical work was considered the most motivating aspect of science lessons at school, especially for students in years 7–9 (KS3). Yet the pipeline of talent in the STEM arena is as important as ever when it comes to the Government’s growth agenda and fulfilling the aims of the Industrial Strategy.

The schools that struggle to attract good science teachers, in whatever discipline, and whose finances are likely to be most fragile (not least because their parents are less likely to be able to offer support, financial or otherwise), will inevitably be those in disadvantaged areas. These issues over teacher shortages will exacerbate all the other problems these schools and pupils face, carrying over from their early years. The statistics are depressing, as revealed in the Social Mobility Report from 2024. Their findings show that, whereas 52.4% of non-disadvantaged pupils got a grade 5 or above in both English and Maths (they don’t specifically look at science), only 25.2% of disadvantaged pupils reached the same level.

However, there is a further knock-on effect for schools which are unable to find sufficient specialist science teachers, and that is whether they offer separate science qualifications (i.e. covering all three separate sciences) or Combined Science, when the three subjects are squeezed into a double GCSE qualification. And, for those schools that offer both, who is making the decisions about which qualification a given student is entered for?  As mentioned above, schools can get away with referring to a non-specialist teacher as ‘specialist’ in Combined Science. The IOP estimates a figure of somewhere around one third of science lessons in Combined Science are taught by actual specialists, as opposed to the figures the Government suggests of 94% when ‘science’ is regarded as a specialism in itself, without distinction between the disciplines. The consequences for the pipeline are profound: again, using IOP data, students who take Combined Science at GCSE are three times less likely to proceed to Physics A Level. This may be as much about their school as their capabilities or interests.

The Government is committed to opportunity for all, but there is clear evidence that disadvantaged pupils, particularly those in overall disadvantaged schools, continue to suffer within the school system. Teachers, particularly those early in their career and in any of the three sciences, are stretched to breaking point by being expected to teach outside their speciality. This means that students are too often taught by non-specialists, particularly in Physics where the shortfall is greatest. The net outcome is that the STEM pipeline into A Levels and beyond is directly impacted and many pupils lose out; simultaneously teachers burn out.

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