Atomic Human – or Atomic Man?

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Athene Donald

I’m not convinced by the idea of AI throwing everyone out of jobs or taking over the world, but I thought I should read up some thoughtful writing on the subject, so I turned to Neil Lawrence’s 2024 book (recently released in paperback), The Atomic Human. I learned a lot from it, but I was struck by the meandering tales he introduces of characters from the past, ranging from Socrates, via his grandfather to the Terminator. It wasn’t that these stories didn’t have a point. Of course they all did, but the characters wove themselves into the fabric of the text in ways that sometimes seemed to me to obscure more than they helped.

I found this mode of writing frustrating, and not necessarily illuminating. Then I read the review of the book by Adam Rutherford, which appeared in the Guardian last year, and realised how absolutely right Adam was about the unhealthy preponderance of great white men of the past (as well as the Terminator with, apparently, 16 appearances dotted around the text) in these stories. As he puts it

‘In a chapter called Enlightenment, we veer from Great Man classic tales of Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill and Stephen Hawking, down a cul-de-sac visiting William Blake and Michelangelo, then to Lewis Carroll and Bertrand Russell, and all the way to Elon Musk, via many more.’

That is a fine old collection of the great and good, but, as he goes on to say

‘I scanned the index and found that 15 women are named in this 448-page book (16 if you count the goddess Hera), as well as the mention of two groups of anonymous women (Royal Navy Wrens, and the women of Bletchley Park). Winnie-the-Pooh, a fictional bear who as far as I am aware, did not make any pronouncements on intelligence research, or the AI revolution, is mentioned 17 times.’

I will admit that, despite all I have said and written about the role of women in science, I had not picked up the gender bias in the text; the woman who appeared most I think was Amelia Earhart. So conditioned am I – along with most of the population but unlike Adam – I had failed to spot that women were all but invisible. The frequent appearance of Winnie-the-Pooh I had spotted. If I were an adolescent girl. maybe I would have been more aware of the absence of role models I could identify with and thereby received an unwanted subliminal message.

Yet, looking more widely away from the book, the few women who did get opportunities to shine in the scientific and technical world from the late nineteenth century on, are beginning to be allowed to come out of the woodwork. Around the time I finished Lawrence’s book, I came across the following on Bluesky

Quantum women

This post highlights a group of women from the 1920s who are finally getting some attention for what they contributed to quantum physics. As time goes on, more and more women are being identified as having made significant if, in general, unsung contributions.

Locally, I could identify Katherine Blodgett, an American who came to Cambridge to work at the Cavendish in 1924 under Ernest Rutherford, with the support of Irving Langmuir, her boss at GE based in Schenectady in upstate New York. She was the first woman to gain a PhD from the Cavendish, so you might have expected her to appear in the 2016 voluminous history of the department written by Malcolm Longair (its former head) Maxwell’s Enduring Legacy. But no, there is no mention of her at all. Some years later (2023) the department did try to rectify this error by writing a blogpost about her, identifying her seminal role  (although its appearance is somewhat marred by the fact the hypertext relating to the photos has not been correctly formatted so the photo of her sitting in the midst of a sea of men is not online).

However, I knew about her long before that, because I had to walk past the wall of photos of generations of graduate students every day to get to the canteen or library. She stood out, along with a few other women (sometimes in very fine, if less than convenient hats) from around the turn of the century. They, presumably did not get PhDs, not least because no one did at Cambridge until 1919. But, beyond the photos, Langmuir-Blodgett films were something I lectured about, and some of my research students used them in their research (they are monolayers, or multiple monolayers, of surfactants laid down on glass or liquid surfaces). Sadly, the Cavendish cannot lay claim to their invention as this was done back at GE and not as part of Blodgett’s PhD.

I think this episode about Blodgett is symptomatic of how so much of our scientific history is narrated: great men of science, with the few women who were involved traditionally being invisible but at last increasingly being brought into focus.

For instance, the staff who did all the calculations at the Harvard Observatory with Edward Pickering were all female from 1880 onwards (a group sometimes unkindly referred to as Pickering’s Harem). This wasn’t a great act of liberalism on his part, but simply because they were cheap. According to David Grier’s book (When Computers were Human), Pickering apparently said

‘a skillful [astronomical] observer should never be obliged to spend time on what could be done equally well by an assistant at a much lower salary.’

Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt were two of these women, whose names are now much more widely known in the field, for their seminal work in classification of the stars and measurement of distance respectively. They were far more than simply cheap labour.

Pickering’s argument on cost was essentially the same one that had been made by William Herschel when he applied – successfully – to Queen Charlotte for funding for his sister Caroline to work as his assistant, more than 100 years earlier.

‘Nor could I have been prevailed upon to mention now, were it not for her evident use in the observations that are to be made…and the increase of the annual expense which, if my Sister were to decline, that office would probably amount to nearly one hundred pounds more for an assistant.’

As has been seen in the case of female composers (and as I wrote about previously on this blog), more and more significant women from the past are finally getting some attention in orchestral programmes and on Radio 3. It is high time women like Katherine Blodgett find their place in write-ups of science’s history. Whether if Neil Lawrence had tried harder to find anecdotes of women who would have fitted into his narrative he could have increased the number of references to women in his book I can’t tell. But I suspect it ought to have been possible to weave in Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to the development of frequency hopping (literally, not just a pretty face in her case) or some other notable names such as Ada Lovelace, Wendy Hall, Grace Hopper or Marissa Mayer, to name just a few who come immediately to my mind.

It would be nice to think in general authors would try harder to diversify their anecdotes, at least when considering the past half century or so. We don’t always need to quote Churchill or Newton, particularly if we are discussing a new field like AI. However, knowing Neil a little, I am quite sure if writing the book again but with the memory of Rutherford’s review, he would want to find more female examples to quote. I suspect he, just like me when I read the book, simply failed to notice the bias because culturally we are all so used to it that it is invisible. That’s what has to change to move towards an equitable society.

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Skills, What Skills?

Posted on May 30, 2025 by Athene Donald

The answer to many of today’s problems seems to lie in the magic word ‘skills’, but this word can be used to mean so many different things, depending on audience and context, that in itself it is far from sufficient to cure anything. Yet, it is absolutely right to focus on the general area as one that needs attention, it’s just that it needs so much attention it might be better if we could find a new, more discerning vocabulary.

To some, skills means a technical skill: say that of a plumber or an electrician, whereas to others it might mean ‘soft skills’, such as teamwork and communication. The skills level could refer to someone with a PhD or someone who left school with few formal qualifications at all. It could mean foundational skills such as numeracy or literacy, or advanced skills such as operating a clean room or flow cytometry equipment. And who the provider of such skills should be will obviously depend on which skills we’re talking about. Certainly, all of schools, FE Colleges and universities need to be included in the list of providers, as well as employers.

If the work of Skills England is to progress, as they finally move out of their shadow form into solid reality, they have to know what challenges they need to face up to. Their new Board, announced this week, has their work cut out for them. Their remit is potentially vast, charged with: bringing coherence to the current incoherent state of play; working out where the ‘skills gaps’ are (which begs the question of which sorts of skills); shaping technical education to respond to the current needs, including how the new Growth and Skills Levy (the new name for the Apprenticeship Levy) can be spent; and provide advice on how this will feed into a clear plan appropriate for a growth economy. No small order then.

Under the old Apprenticeship Levy there had been a steady drift towards higher level qualifications at the expense of fresh school leavers, and already it is clear this will no longer be permissible: formally, level 7 (i.e. Masters Level) apprenticeships will only be available to those aged 21 and under, in essence stopping this route. Such a change was advocated earlier in the year by Alison Wolf in her policy primer Saving Apprenticeships, a publication containing, as she put it to me in a private conversation, ‘far more than you ever wanted to know about apprentices’. It is indeed a comprehensive discussion of the state of play at the time of writing (it was published at the start of this year).  She wanted a clear distinction between these higher level apprentices, which she saw as essentially employers accessing CPD on the cheap for their employees, and apprenticeships enabling youngsters to get their foot on the job ladder or adults seeking to gain new, sub-degree, qualifications and skills.

Adult education has long been a poor child of the education system. Gone are the days of easy access to multiple evening classes provided locally to allow those who had struggled at school to have a second chance at gaining qualifications. Money is too tight in the sector for much to be available. Furthermore, particularly at FE Colleges, there is often a shortage of teachers. But if (and so far it is an ‘if’, as it’s not really happened substantially yet as people try to work out how to make best use of it) AI is going to remove many jobs, there will be a pressing need for adults to retrain for where the jobs still are. In many more technical areas, FE teachers are in short supply because the pay is so dismal compared with what they could earn elsewhere (as is true for Physics teachers in schools). Indeed, FE lecturers are paid badly by any standards, typically about £10,000 less than an experienced school teacher.

With the plans for revitalising the construction industry workforce recently announced, adult learners will potentially benefit from £14 million of adult skills funding for construction to be devolved to local mayors. This initiative is expected to support up to 5,000 additional adult learners, and new level 2 courses relevant to the sector will be set up. So specific goals for the revised Growth and Apprenticeship levy are beginning to emerge.

Plans such as these are all very well, but every apprenticeship – at whatever level – needs an employer to take them on and to cover much of the cost, including salary. At present, there are far more people wishing to start an apprenticeship than openings available. The construction industry works largely with small firms covering, perhaps, just one or two specialities (electrical, plumbing and so on). These typically act as sub-contractors as part of a larger job and may well struggle to cope with trainin someone just starting out, not to mention being put off by the complexity of the current course landscape (anyhow limited by local availability and transport), funding mechanisms and overall bureaucracy. So, there are many challenges in ensuring a steady supply of SMEs willing and able to take a school-leaver (or, indeed, an adult) on an apprenticeship which will need to be ironed out if the ‘skills’ arena is to progress as the economy needs.

Thus, although the advent of Skills England, and the direction of travel implied by both the Growth and Opportunity Missions, suggest an ecosystem that is changing, the nature of that change and the effectiveness of new initiatives, structures and any new funding to handle the ‘skills’ agenda remains to be seen. Explicit disaggregation of what ‘skills’ are, so that in any context it is clear everyone is talking about the same thing, will be required if appropriate interventions can be successfully introduced as part of any new strategy.

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Choosing Your Image

Posted on May 12, 2025 by Athene Donald

We all know people who seem quintessentially comfortable in their own skins, who effortlessly fit in to whatever group they want to belong to and reign supreme in their world (at least socially). But, note my use of the word ‘seem’. It is worth pondering whether that is their own lived reality.

I’m prompted to this train of thought by hearing a Radio 3 presenter discuss Edward Elgar as someone who ‘often felt an outsider’. His reputation now implies that he represents the height of Edwardian ‘pomp and circumstance’, the imperial zeitgeist. Whether or not you think that’s a good thing, he would seem to have been right inside the system of the day. Yet, as a self-taught musician, that was apparently not his own sense of self. He felt an outsider, because he hadn’t been trained in the formal schools of music like his peers.

I can think of many colleagues who occasionally have let their masks slip to let their insecure inner self creep out. The amazingly successful professor, with prizes a-plenty to their name, who clearly was damaged by being a nerd at their posh public school where the ‘in set’ were the Rugby players. Knowing that, I could see how he always felt that he was on the outside, however much others felt that’s where they were while he was a key central player in the research environment.  It didn’t make him an easy person for others to interact with. Or the Fellow of that grandest of Cambridge Colleges, Trinity, who admitted he never felt he truly belonged because he had been educated elsewhere, whereas many on the fellowship were Trinity through and through. The College may have changed (after all, its current Master Sally Davies was not Cambridge educated at all), but that feeling of being an outsider will probably go with him to the grave.

Or there was the senior colleague to whom I was once unburdening myself of the feeling of not fitting in as a female physicist, who startled me by saying when things went wrong for him, or when people were rude, he tried not to believe it was because he was a Jew. Despite having known him and worked closely with him for many years, I’d never known (or indeed thought about) his religious affiliation. For most of us, at least for some if not all of the time, there will be some fear, niggling or much bigger, that everyone else fits in but you have some stain on your pedigree that somehow means you are only on the outside looking in, different from everyone else.

Reading Simon Fanshawe’s book, The Power of Difference, has introduced the word ‘covering’ into my lexicon. I knew the concept because, now I know it is a name, I know how I have used it at different times. It’s not dissimilar to ‘code-switching’, to move between different manners of speaking (something Michelle Obama discusses as a black woman navigating a predominantly white world in her book The Light We Carry); or to the ‘masking’ behaviour of autistic girls Gina Rippon discusses in her recent book The Lost Girls of Autism. Whatever you call it, you’re probably familiar with behaviour along these lines – at least unless you’re incredibly sure of yourself. The feeling you need to act a role in order to fit in with whatever group you’re currently amongst.

The time I remember doing this best, or perhaps I mean worst as I look back at how I behaved with some horror, was at an annual conference in my field. Being one of a paltry number of women, I wanted – fairly consciously – to be ‘one of the boys’. One who was welcome down the pub and seen as a good laugh. So I adopted a persona which was not my own; somewhat raucous and laughing at the double entendres of my associates, downing pints. At some point I decided I had had enough. Perhaps I felt secure enough in my affiliation to the in-crowd to feel I could drop that un-me persona, but I’m sure there will be a generation of men who believed that was the true me.

Was it worth doing? Maybe. It certainly seemed so at the time, yet in retrospect it just feels distasteful. There is a price to pay for acting outside one’s true self. It is important to work out what really matters and what is less important. In order to progress, in science or wherever, it may require you to put on a false sense of confidence as you give a conference presentation or take on some new committee role. That is probably worth doing since no one wants to listen to the lecturer mumbling away inaudibly (however exciting the results), or dropping the committee papers on the floor – less likely in this paperless age admittedly – due to nerves. But pretending to be someone you are not in other ways – as I did when I assumed a cheeky, extrovert and raucous character – is hardly necessary and may backfire. These are difficult balancing acts to get right. Yet each of us, every day, is faced with decisions big or small about how to portray oneself and align it with who we really are.

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What do ‘Skills’ Mean to You?

Posted on April 27, 2025 by Athene Donald

We frequently hear the word ‘skills’ tossed about, as in ‘there’s a skills shortage’ or ‘a skills mismatch’, but put a bunch of people in a room, and ask them to discuss skills, and – with no additional qualifying words – people will head off in a myriad different directions. Having been involved in two very different round tables recently, with skills as the topic of discussion, I can vouch for the diffuseness of the ensuing conversation, meaning that it is hard to drill down into any specific aspect of the challenge.

There is no doubt this topic is a challenge, something recognized by the Government in myriad ways. Skills England – charged with ‘bring[ing] together key partners to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all regions’, no small task – is about to spring into existence as soon as the snappily titled Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill has completed its passage through Parliament. Imminent, we are told. Then, if you read the Industrial Strategy Green Paper back in the autumn you would have seen skills mentioned as a key barrier (indeed, the first in the long bullet point list of barriers). It is encouraging to note that the February minutes of the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council (ISAC) identify that Members noted that ‘people and skills cuts across all workstreams and growth-driving sectors, requiring a focused join-up between the ISAC, Skills England and the Department for Education.’ And that Phil Smith, the new Chair of Skills England, is ex officio  a member of the ISAC. Continuing on the theme of how skills transcends Government departments and that the Government fully recognizes this, they feature in both the Growth Mission and the Opportunity Mission.

However, as I say, my experience of a bunch of people sitting over a nice dinner with skills as the topic of discussion shows just how multi-dimensional the problem is. To different people it might mean (in no particular order):

  • What is AI going to do to jobs and hence the skills people will need in the future?
  • How can NEETS be best supported?
  • Are we producing the right number of doctoral students in the right fields?
  • What should happen to the apprenticeship levy as it morphs into the Growth and Skills Levy?
  • What would lead to an optimum form for the Lifelong Learning Entitlement when it finally takes effect?
  • What should be done to make sure graduates leave university with the ‘soft’ or transferable skills employers seek?
  • How should regional variations in skills needs be handled?
  • What can philanthropy do to help socio-economically disadvantaged students?
  • What should be done to upskill adults whose jobs are disappearing?

You can see the list is long and varied and, in a couple of hours discussion while the food is served and wine consumed, it is impossible to come up with any in-depth solutions to any, let alone all, of them. But, the length of the list illustrates the scale of the problem, even before one starts worrying about the finances of any potential solutions one might dream up.

To reflect some of the issues I’m currently involved with in the Cambridge area, let me turn to one specific issue, that of asking what should be done to ensure that the well-recognized problem of an ageing technician workforce is addressed,. Even focussing just on this specific topic can be a minefield. Who is a technician? Are we talking about those with PhDs who go on to join research groups and make a significant contribution through a detailed understanding of a crucial and complex piece of kit, or are we talking about an animal house technician who may have left school at 16 with few qualifications under their belt?

Recently, there has been more attention focussed on technicians in the HE workforce by the work Kelly Vere has led at Nottingham University: the TALENT Commission and the accompanying Technician Commitment. More than 120 organisations have now signed up to the latter, demonstrating a determination to treat this part of their employee base with more care and attention. But that doesn’t in itself address the technician pipeline. Who becomes a technician and what qualifications do they or should they possess? It’s back to skills. I have previously argued that universities should play a more substantial role in training young people for these roles, whether or not they are going to stay in the HE Sector, as part of their ‘civic duty’. Universities should be in a better position to train school leavers, for instance, than a small start-up in a region, but these people may go on to make a substantial contribution to the regional economy through their ability to translate new ideas (‘diffusion’) and contribute to absorptive capacity.

Some of these could easily enter this technician pathway through an apprenticeship. Although it has been stated that there will be changes made to the current Apprenticeship levy, possibly including the removal of Level 7 (Masters) courses from its remit, the full shape of the changes is yet to be revealed. The changes to convert the current system into a future ‘Growth and Skills Levy’ need to ensure that employers invest more productively into the training of their workforce, to counter years of decline. Alison Wolf has persuasively argued that a clear distinction should be made between investment in apprenticeships for those first joining the workforce, and upskilling existing employers through degree apprenticeships (levels 6 and 7, corresponding to degree and masters’ courses), something that essentially amounts to CPD. Both are clearly important, but also significantly different and should be formally recognized as such.

No one should be in any doubt that the issue of skills is a problem. However one drills down into the question, the challenges are manifest. But, in order to make progress, it really is important to know which part of the question one is addressing, rather than lump everything together in one large basket of headaches labelled ‘skills’.

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Gender Pay Gaps: Getting Worse

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Athene Donald

This is the season when all larger employers have had to report their gender pay gap. Is it good news? No, things appear to be going backwards.

“Enduring gender pay disparities in Whitehall reflect low female representation in senior roles and over-representation in junior positions.”

says the Financial Times about the widening gender pay gaps in the Civil Service. The same newspaper reports that Lloyds Banking Group’s median pay gap rose by 2.7 percentage points to 35.5 per cent last year, meaning that Lloyds Bank had the fourth-largest pay gap of any employer with more than 5,000 staff.

Recently UKRI also reported an increase in the gender pay gap of their own employees. As they put it, this is

“largely influenced by distribution of males and females within the workforce rather than differences in pay within the bands”.

In other words, there are more men than women towards the top of the pay scales in senior roles at UKRI.  The explanation for the increasing differential in male and female salaries at UKRI is attributed to a refreshed scale for employees involved with research (for instance, scientists in one of their institutes) compared with others, such as clerical staff handling grant proposals. It won’t surprise anyone to know that there are more women in the latter, less well-paid roles and more men in roles that might take them out to sea on a NERC boat (the one that isn’t named Boaty McBoatface) or to running a large research group at the John Innes, Sanger or LMB. At least these institutes are still allowed to have links to EDI initiatives on their websites, unlike their American parallels, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Thus, across all these examples we are seeing a similar sort of gender segregation in roles. Changing this requires a total cultural rethink of who does what. However good anyone’s intentions – and I’m absolutely sure that from the top of UKRI down, intentions are good – our society still tends to push women one way and men another. This is, of course, not just a UK problem. It is well-known that the Scandinavian countries score highly on equality issues, and yet they are as susceptible to this sort of role segregation as any other country. Indeed, in some ways they are even worse. Nordics Info state clearly that

“Nordic countries also have greater horizontal segregation by sex than the rest of the EU, that is, most women work in different occupations than most men.”

They go on to say:

“In Denmark for instance over 60% of all workers are employed in a profession where their own sex accounts for 75% or more.”

– sectors such as education and the public sector. Clearly, creating a more equal society where, for instance, parental leave is more genuinely shared, is not sufficient to eradicate societal norms about what a ‘nice girl’ does and, just as importantly, what she isn’t expected to do.

Relevant to this, I’ve just finished reading Fiona Erskine’s book Phosphate Rocks: A death in ten objects, which highlights some of these issues.  Woven into her story about an unexplained body in the disused chemical factory at Leith, is her alter ego chemical engineer Fiona, the first graduate woman to work shifts at this factory producing fertiliser. She only hints at the problems she must have faced in the ‘80’s, but the reality is that, for the real Fiona working in this factory in a minority of one, it must have been hard. Fiona can’t be much younger than me, and also a graduate of Cambridge. In my own cohort of students there were precisely two women who took the engineering tripos (although I can’t be 100% sure there weren’t others doing chemical engineering, which was a final year option at the time, but one you could also approach via the Natural Sciences route).

But, somewhat younger than either of us was Shima Barakat, a woman who was the only female working on the Cairo underground many years ago, an experience she can now laugh about but which clearly wasn’t very funny at the time. Engineering remains stubbornly male-dominated at every level and, if anything, the profession is heading in the wrong direction. A 2024 briefing from Engineering UK showed that the percentage of women working in engineering and technology occupations had actually dropped from 16.5% in 2022 to 15.7% in 2023. Their analysis further showed that, although more women were entering the profession, the drop out at mid-career more than offset the increasing entry level numbers.

This is not the way to close the gender pay gap. What are organisations doing wrong? Are they not flexible enough for women whose caring responsibilities are typically more arduous than for men? Are their working environments so inimical to a pleasant atmosphere that women get to a stage of just not wanting to hack it anymore? Or do they get fed up when they see younger men being promoted over them because of unconscious bias in those doing the promotions? The EngineeringUK report simply looks at the statistics, so those questions are not addressed.

I have never forgotten a 2014 report from Murray Edwards (a women’s only College in Cambridge) who had surveyed their alumnae, which stated that

“the most difficult challenge they have faced in their careers is the non-supportive culture of their workplace. Shockingly, this is just as true for women aged 20-29 as for our older age group.”

That was true whichever sector the women were working in, but is likely to be heightened by isolation if, like Fiona Erskine, you are the only woman on a shift. OK, the report is more than ten years old but, given the statistics, it is hard to see the world has changed much.

Women still face workface harassment; they are still too often discouraged from entering some sectors, even if the discouragement is only subliminal; and society has not yet adjusted to the fact that it is not only women who do the caring, so that men taking (for instance) parental leave are too often stigmatised. The gender pay gap will never close as long as these and other systemic issues persist.

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