Is Ballroom Dancing like Academia?

Posted on March 24, 2025 by Athene Donald

One of my secret loves is watching each series of Strictly Come Dancing. It is a feel-good vibe we all need in these dark geopolitical days, however much I don’t care how many sequins are sewed on by hand.  So, when head judge Shirley Ballas’ memoirs were for sale at 99p on Kindle, I splashed out. What I wasn’t expecting was to find how much her world of ballroom dancing resonated with experiences many women in the sciences would be familiar with. Perhaps most spheres have similar problems.

Sentences like

‘The more successful I became as a female in that [ballroom dancing] world, the more it seemed the men at the top wanted to put me down.’

Sound familiar to mid-career women? It reminds me of the newly minted female FRS who, a number of years ago told me her department wouldn’t celebrate because it ‘wasn’t her turn’. Clearly she had put someone’s nose out of joint, because some male colleague had felt more entitled than her, as a mere woman.  Entitlement is such a pernicious emotion.

When I was writing my book about women in science, I conducted an entirely unscientific survey to find out what mid-career women of my acquaintance, across a range of disciplines, felt about how they were treated now they were successful. I explicitly asked them if things were better or worse, so as not to phrase the question in a leading way. Most had reservations about their experiences (although some noted how much less they were susceptible to sexual harassment, undoubtedly a massive improvement). But answers often indicated similar sentiments to Ballas, such as:

‘My main observation is that my achievements are not as important as those of other researchers. “Excellence” is a perception not an absolute. And I often get the impression that my successes (e.g. high impact publications) are resented, rather than celebrated.’

In a slightly different vein, to take another couple of sentences from the Ballas book:

‘Was it because I didn’t do exactly what I was told? Was it because I didn’t toe the line, because I didn’t always agree with what was said?’

Another feeling I strongly recognized, as did others. For instance, one woman of my acquaintance said

‘If I return conversational fire at even half the intensity I’m receiving it people will back off, frightened and sometimes even complain that I am threatening. This acts to exclude me from robust discussion that others can participate in.‘

Women are, it would seem, too often expected to do what they are told without fighting their corner, a sure-fire way to get trampled on and fail to progress.

It probably is the case that many men feel similarly, that if they don’t metaphorically fight for themselves they will get squashed, and if they do they will be seen as not behaving properly by those who try to control things, but it’s a double whammy for women because we cannot help but be ‘different’. The reality is that, in any, even perhaps in all sectors, there are those (cast your eye across the Atlantic) who want women to remember they are not entitled to anything very much at all except do what they are told – amounting to coercive control in a domestic situation, although I’m not sure there is an equivalent phrase professionally – and bear and bring up children.

When I lived in the USA, back in the years around 1980, I remember seeing flyers in windows around Ithaca saying of Ronald Reagan, the Republican candidate back then, ‘This man has what it takes to set the world back twenty years’. By comparison, what followed that election was a relatively benign period compared with what we are seeing right now. But, I come back to that word ‘entitlement’, which many men seem to feel but far fewer women.

The other side of the coin is, of course, the issue that this week’s HEPI report highlighted – how many male teenagers don’t make the grade at GCSE and thereafter. We should indeed worry about these boys, who are brought up in a world which seems to work against them, and which spits them out at a higher rate than young women. And it spits them out into a world which fuels their resentment in dangerous ways, rather than offering them a safety net, a way to get back onto a ladder which will lead to employment and a secure home and life.  There is no doubt that this is a massive problem that we have to find ways to overcome, to ensure that teenage boys don’t feel disaffected from society before they’ve even started on their adult trajectory. But many of them will react at least as badly as Professor X when they see a contemporary female achieving more than they manage and some deeply rooted societal message implies ‘that’s not fair, men should be the top dog’.

I have no solutions to this problem. Maybe it will take many generations for the idea of true equality between the sexes to take firm hold. All I can point out is, if you are a woman – at any stage of your career and probably in any sector – if a man is determined to demean you it does not mean the criticism is legitimate. It is so easy for a woman to feel that somehow she has transgressed if a diatribe (or silent action) is directed at her to suggest she should know her place. The reality, although it may be small consolation, is that a man may be feeling threatened when his own inadequacies are being shown up, or his status implicitly questioned. Unfortunately, it is all too often impossible to avoid such people and work with those – of whom there are many – who are genuinely supportive.

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Another Year, Another IWD: What’s Changed?

Posted on March 8, 2025 by Athene Donald

Every year International Women’s Day sparks a momentary bout of reflection about the state of women in our society. The  House of Lords has an annual debate, for instance, this year about women in STEM.  Social media will showcase many women’s stories, past and present, highlighting both those known well and those less so. For myself, and I’m sure many like me, multiple invitations turn up on my desk inviting me to give a talk here or there (which typically clash so I cannot accept them all). But does anything fundamentally change?

At one level the answer is obviously yes. There are more women on FTSE Boards and running universities. The Supreme Court is not all male and about half of Cambridge colleges are now led by women, although some colleges are still at the stage of appointing their first female head (most recently Selwyn). Compared with when I was growing up, huge progress has been made. At another level, at the level of inherent attitudes to what men and women can do, there is still too much question about whether women are ‘up’ to any particular challenge. Leaving aside what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic, one can still see fainter echoes here.

Take the scrutiny over Rachel Reeves’ qualifications as an economist; no one questioned George Osborne’s or Jeremy Hunt’s experience or degree relevance. It is hard not to see this as a double standard being applied to a woman. Such scrutiny implicitly weakens her authority. Or the current anxiety over boys doing less well at school (of course something that everyone should be worried about), compared with decades of indifference when the gender gap was the other way round. I suspect the recent analysis of EPSRC grant data that shows that women are much more successful at obtaining fellowships than men (by some 80%; I’m not sure if there is a clear explanation of this yet) may provoke concern, despite the fact that university leadership and the professorial ranks remain stubbornly male, particularly in a subject like my own (Physics).

I would like to think progress was well and truly being made, but the reality is, when I go to talk – as I still do – to groups of young researchers about these issues, the same concerns raise their heads. How do I get taken seriously? What do I do when my supervisor isn’t supportive? Why is it always the women (and the minoritised ethnics) who have to do the heavy lifting in making improvements happen? The very fact that student women’s groups feel the need to invite me to talk about my own experiences is testament to the fact they don’t want to feel alone in what may feel like splendid isolation in some groups. In that sense, no, things have not progressed to the point where these are no longer matters of concern.

Then there is of course the small matter of the gender pay gap. In the 55 years since the original Equal Pay Act that Barbara Castle introduced in 1970, there is still – almost universally across sectors – a significant gender pay gap. Again, yes, it has been decreasing, but it still stands at 7%, according to the last ONS data. It has actually increased for managers, directors and senior officials, according to the same data. Some, but not all of this, will be down to grade/role segregation. This is just as true in the supposedly egalitarian Scandinavian countries, as this commentary on Norway demonstrates. But we must all worry whether the backlash against DEI initiatives in the USA spills over to our own shores. It is of course right to worry about the numbers of working-class boys becoming NEETS, but that shouldn’t blind us to the fact that girls who do well at school may well find their subsequent progression up the career ladder stalls and that their pay falls behind their male contemporaries.

The reasons behind these social challenges are many and varied, and initiatives that help one part of our community may not work elsewhere. However, that we live in a society where equal pay for equal work does not automatically fall out from decisions in the workplace – by managers and HR departments – is a disgrace. This is not even a case of trying to work out whether ‘dinner ladies’ and ‘bin men’ are doing equally skilled jobs (as in the Birmingham City Council tribunal some years ago), but whether two people sitting at adjacent desks doing identical roles get paid the same. If one negotiates on hiring and the other doesn’t (stereotypically male and female traits), the difference in salary may perpetuate and even grow throughout a career, without anyone noticing or indeed intending such a discrepancy.

And finally, in this IWD rant, if society continues to assume the woman is the primary carer, even when it has been pointed out – to a school or nursery for instance – that it is the man who should be contacted in case of an emergency, for instance, we will continue to reinforce these stereotypes. As long as such assumptions are made, by the individual and by society, we are not making the best use of all our talents by looking at the reality not some out-of-date vision of what ‘should’ be.

When it comes to International Women’s Day, it is a good moment to pause and think both about how far gender equality has progressed, but also how it is stuck. For the specific case of women in STEM, let me do my annual IWD reminder of the list of things anyone, whatever their gender, age or occupation, can do to improve the situation for aspiring and practicing female scientists. I originally entitled this Just1Action4WIS (Just one action for women in science) and, although it’s all but ten years old now, it is still as important now as then.

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The Importance of Manufacturing

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Athene Donald

How many factories have you visited in your life? Do you have any sense of what goes on there? When I was a postdoc in the Cambridge Materials Science Department, helping out with undergraduate projects, I was offered a chance to visit what was then a major ICI production plant at Welwyn Garden City. Forget the fact that neither the factory nor indeed ICI exist now, this was an opportunity for me to visit a full-scale manufacturing site, where vast expanses of polymer film were produced. I leapt at the chance, naively mentioning during the visit that I had never been to a factory before. The ICI personnel seemed stunned. But why would I have?

Since then, I’ve been to a fair few such places. To Baxters on Speyside for a fun family day out, watching how soup and jam are produced from a safe distance. (At the time I refrained from pointing out my food physics credentials, despite my husband’s urging, to identify myself as a member of the Government Office for Science Food and Drink Foresight Panel, meant to be crystal-gazing at the future of the sector twenty years hence from the early ‘90’s.) To a breakfast cereal factory on the Welsh borders during my days of researching starch granule structure. That was a day memorable not least for being, however respectable, totally unsuitably dressed for climbing up and down ladders to look inside vats, dressed as I was in a skirt and heeled shoes. Back then I felt I needed to look serious if I was to be taken seriously (this would also have been in the ‘90’s). To later ICI factories, in Slough for paint and Teeside for more polymer films produced at phenomenal speeds….And so on.

However, impressive though large machinery is, and interesting though it is to see production lines, have I ever really stopped to think about manufacturing as a ‘thing’? Of course, the answer is no, not really. So much of what surrounds us it is all too easy to take for granted until it goes wrong (think of the glass vial shortage when there was a pressing need for them to store vaccines during the pandemic). Supply chains matter. Where some vital component comes from to complete an everyday product, suddenly becomes important when the Suez Canal gets blocked by a ship making a mess of a tricky manoeuvre. This we discovered the hard way during our house refurbishment, when all the replacement, fire-proof doors needed for our house renovation got stuck on the wrong side of the Canal. Who knew doors came from the other side of the world?

So, if you are in the same position of not having given manufacturing much thought, an easy solution is at hand. My Churchill and Cambridge colleague Tim Minshall, head of the Institute for Manufacturing in Cambridge, has just written an informative but easy-to-read book about the world of manufacturing: Your life is manufactured: How we make things, why it matters and how we can do it better. It is a great read, full of informative nuggets of information dispensed in a light-hearted but also serious way. I thoroughly recommend it.

As a society we constantly demand more: more stuff, more sophisticated stuff, more variety of stuff and so on. As academics we are often charged to be entrepreneurial, to take our discoveries out into the world of impact to make a better widget. But the reality is, there is a huge gulf between the germ of an idea, even if elegantly written up in some top-notch journal, and making something at scale at a cost that will sell and having sorted out all the logistics to make that happen. Few academics have that skillset and certainly not without a lot of trial and error to achieve a satisfactory end result.

Furthermore, these days anyone trying to produce some new product/widget needs to pay attention to the ‘cost’ in the broadest sense: to energy use and air miles, to impact on the planet and pollution. The last chapter in the book is concerned with what changes are ongoing and are needed to be developed so that, as the chapter title says, we ‘survive’ despite our apparently insatiable desire for more stuff. As he points out, manufacturing is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions after electricity and heat production. We need seriously to tackle this issue, including by cutting back on our desires – as an example, buying fewer clothes and wearing them for longer is a good place to start. But we can also consider the production of the clothes we do buy so that they generate less (water in particular) pollution and make sure that far less ends up in landfill to rot over decades.

Food is of course essential, but we waste an awful lot of that too. In my time working on food all those years ago, people were already considering how to make better use of ‘waste’ from large-scale food production. I recall a cunning plan to use onion skins to make novel glues, for instance (apparently there is a lot of onion waste in the fast-food market). But all of us, even in our own homes, waste a lot of food. The figures of food wastage that we buy and then toss away because it’s past it’s sell-by date or rotted in the bottom of the refrigerator, is stunning, although admittedly the rotting vegetables probably don’t count as ‘manufactured’. Around 9.5 million tons of food waste is generated in the UK each year, the vast majority in domestic not commercial settings.  Globally around a third of food produced gets chucked. We could do so much better on this and many other fronts. Read the book if you want to know more about what you could do in changing how you live to waste less of the manufactured goods we are surrounded by.

I hope I’ve whetted your appetite. It’s an entertaining and informative book. Having talked to Tim during the writing process, I know he worried if he had got the balance right between being too technical and too ‘popular’. I’d say he’s found a pretty happy medium.

 

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International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2025

Posted on February 11, 2025 by Athene Donald

It is ten years since UNESCO declared today, February 11th, as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Less well-known, I suspect, than International Women’s Day, it has a more specific focus. Sadly, in its ten years of existence, progress against its goals has not been particularly marked, despite the importance of women and girls entering the world of science to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Indeed, one could hazard a guess that in some places (notably Afghanistan) things will have gone backwards, with girls denied education of any sort at secondary level, never mind in the sciences.

The UNESCO call for action focusses on three areas, calling for urgent multistakeholder collaborative actions to: dismantle gender stereotypes and biases in science; open educational pathways for girls in science; and create empowering workplace environments. The UK could look at its own culture and consider how well it is doing across these objectives. Better than Afghanistan obviously, but we’ve a long way to go to eradicate gender differences in terms of pathways and stereotypes. In the run-up to last year’s Day, Teach First carried out a survey of children’s attitudes to science and maths (for children between the ages of 11 and 16). They found that more than half of girls (54.3%) don’t feel confident learning maths, compared to two-fifths (41.2%) of boys, with the gap even wider for science, with more than four in ten girls (43%) not confident, compared with a quarter of boys (26%). What is it in our society and our teaching that leads to this substantial difference, and why are teachers unable to overcome the issues?

Note, this is a problem of confidence not ability. When it comes to GCSEs, girls outperform boys, but the lack of confidence continues to manifest itself in that fewer girls than boys progress to A Levels in the STEM subjects, with particular shortfalls in the ‘hard’ sciences such as Physics and Computing, as well as Further Maths. Of course, these numbers then translate into lower numbers entering university to study those subjects as well as Engineering. And yet, report after report highlights how diversity in a company’s workforce leads to better outcomes, be it in a company’s profits or innovation.

By celebrating both girls and women in science, February 11th specifically highlights the pipeline. If girls get deterred from any interest they may have in science early on, they are unlikely to enter the STEM professions later. Schools and teachers have a key role to play here, in identifying what it is in their school ethos that may be holding girls back. The IOP’s (now quite old) data showing how single sex schools are more likely to see girls progress to A Level than coeducational establishments, must tell us something about the school environment in general.  I’m not convinced that things have improved since that 2012 report.

A small-scale study from the USA highlighted that children (both boys and girls) as young as 6 or 7 already see boys as inherently ‘smarter’ than girls. This is something that our society should be capable of eradicating if it put its mind to it. The belief that you have to be especially clever in order to be able to do Physics (particularly if you are a girl) is, again, borne out by many studies. The ASPIRES2 cohort study, led by Louise Archer, surveyed many children between the ages of 14 and 19. It showed that girls who do physics are regarded as exceptional, possessing high levels of cultural, social and science capital. They are presumed not to be typically ‘girly’. Girls may not identify with this description, indeed they may not want to identify with it. Furthermore, Physics is represented – in textbooks and overall narrative – as a subject for men. A lack of explicit representation of women in physics can lead to the assumption that women are unable to work in physics, or are unsuited to it. Once again it is not necessarily ability that is in question here, so much as a feeling of belonging or wanting to belong to the exclusive sect that appears not to be for them. Similar attitudes can be seen in those whose cultural capital or socioeconomic background leads them to feel unwanted in the subject.

More needs to be done to analyse, not just what deters girls from entering Physics (and, by extension,  Engineering and probably Computing), quite a lot is known about this. Now we also need to know what interventions would make a difference and, crucially, at what age. How is that girls imbibe the notion so early that they are less smart than boys? What would make a difference? Is it in how teachers interact in the classroom? Or is it in the messages they receive through the various media (social and otherwise) and their homes? Could teachers, if innocent of conveying the message themselves, do a better job of actively counteracting society’s messages throughout school years? Would more stories of modern women (and not just Marie Curie and, slightly more recently, Katherine Johnson) have a visible impact on the enthusiasm girls evince for the STEM subjects?

I don’t know the answers to questions like these but I think collectively we need to find them. I do worry, however, that a headteacher who is frequently lauded (at least by the last government) as leading such an outstanding school as Michaela, and yet who is unaware – or at least unconcerned – that her school has a below-average percentage of girls studying Physics at A Level, is the tip of the iceberg in the teaching profession. If diversity is only considered in terms of behaviour in the classroom in their training, how are teachers – particularly non-science-specialist teachers – to recognize and deal with the problem? And do they have the bandwidth to do something about this when their lives are so full and stressed already?

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The Need to Join the Dots

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Athene Donald

Last week, I attended an event organised by The Productivity Institute and, more locally, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, as part of National Productivity Week. The meeting’s theme was Innovation and Infrastructure in the East. Note, despite the recent announcement by the Chancellor of the plans for the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor (which used, under the previous government, to be known as the Ox-Cam Arc and was first supported and then cancelled; it covers a swathe of country between Oxford and Cambridge, including the cities themselves) this meeting was about the east: Cambridgeshire, Suffolk and Norfolk. This part of the country is unusual in that it consists of a number of old market towns and many villages, not a large if sprawling urban conurbation of the likes of London, Birmingham or Manchester. Skills was mentioned a lot and with concern.

If you live in a fenland village, the chances are the buses are rare to non-existent, and travel to a college may therefore be a grave challenge.  Your social capital may not be great and the careers advice you’ve been able to access sparse and unhelpful. Your local college may or may not provide the courses you seek, or which would provide you with a good route to progression, for instance as a lab technician or plumber. Of course, if you come from a family with good social and cultural capital this may not matter, and you may simply be planning the linear route through A Levels and on to university somewhere far from home. Let us recall, around 50% of the 16 year-old population will not be going that way, though, many may not want to go far from their home and far too many will end up as NEETs (not in education, employment or training). Yet we need this 50% to be productive in our economy. The fancy labs of the Ox-Cam corridor will rely on technicians; the building of hundreds of thousands of houses in the region won’t happen without plumbers – and electricians, bricklayers, plasterers and so on. Growth will not happen, nor opportunity for all as the Government mission has it, if we ignore the needs of those for whom college and apprentices are the right route.

In this vein, the Commons Education Committee has just announced an enquiry into Further Education and Skills, which may cover some of this important ground. It should also be noted that the Industrial Strategy Green paper, published last autumn, put skills at the top of its list of potential barriers to investment (although saying surprisingly little explicitly about the issue in the bulk of the document). Skills has to sit at the heart of growth, alongside investment. It needs to be thought about in depth, and not just mentioned as something to be sorted without detailed planning.  How is this to happen?

The concern about training/education and how it joins up with what the country needs in its future workforce was also made quite plain last week in a different context. The CSA at DSIT (the Department of Science Innovation and Technology), Chris Johnson*, was speaking to the Science and Technology Committee chaired by Chi Onwurah, along with other departmental CSAs. Asked about his concerns, he had this to say:

The concern I have is that, with limited resources, how do we look to the next generation of scientists and engineers and make sure we have sufficient capability that is, at least in some approximation, of where we want to be in 5 or 10 years. And if we leave it to pure chance or the choices of the students, bluntly that may not align with where we need to be. How we can manage a national dialogue I think is the appropriate way forward…We need to be more upfront about the skillset we need going forward.

In that, he encapsulates many of the problems we are facing: limited money and a pipeline of talent in STEM that may not best fit the UK’s needs, whether it wants to be a ‘science superpower’ or a nation leading in AI, or prepared for cyberattacks and pandemics. How is that national dialogue going to be initiated? By whom and involving whom? Skills England is in the process of being set up and would seem to be one potential location. But it has been a long time in gestation so it is still hard to know how it may operate. This might be where the dialogue Chris Thomson wants might happen, but if it is solely an internal dialogue amongst its yet-to-be-announced members, it is unlikely to satisfy everyone. Furthermore, is it going to put its focus on those who do or don’t go to university? Focus on both is needed.

Mission-led government should help bring the different strands and arguments together, in this case skills will sit in part under the Opportunity Mission (led by the Department for Education), but – as with the Industrial Strategy – the Growth Mission will also need to be paying much attention to the issue. As Thomson said, we may not be heading in the right direction in terms of alignment of skilled workers (researchers and many other STEM trained workers) with the country’s needs if its economy is to grow. Locally, we need to be having this dialogue too – as the conversation at TPI’s meeting showed – recognizing that a solution to Manchester’s issues may differ greatly from what is appropriate in a transport-poor region of small towns and villages. Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich may be thriving, but if they are inaccessible to large numbers of potential students that will not help them or the economy.

* The CSA’s name was originally erroneously given as Chris Thompson (corrected 10-2-25)

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