{"id":3878,"date":"2013-10-08T11:11:19","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T11:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=3878"},"modified":"2013-12-19T19:14:21","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T19:14:21","slug":"turning-the-mirror-on-oneself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2013\/10\/08\/turning-the-mirror-on-oneself\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning the Mirror on Oneself"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do you see when you look in the mirror? This is the question underlying the What I See Project<\/a>, conceived by Edwina Dunn<\/a>. Her concern is that we live in a society where, for many women, when we look in the mirror we are expected to look at \u2013 and even more and worse, be judged by \u2013 the superficial details, not what resides within. For young women around the world, this is a restrictive view of who we are and what we might be. \u00a0Her aim is to aid the empowerment of women by getting them to reflect on who they are beneath the surface and not be sucked into believing beauty is only skin deep.\u00a0 This is an issue that resonates with me as I am all too aware young girls readily believe the media messages that their aspirations should amount to little more than be eye-candy to catch a boy, sexualised from an early age rather than focussed on what they are actually able to achieve in more concrete ways using their brains and not simply their bodies.<\/p>\n

I have become involved with this project as an Ambassador, and you can find my own brief video for the project here<\/a>, along with those of the other 17 women from the UK who have taken on this ambassadorial role. Amongst them are some powerful women (3 baronesses for instance) including fellow scientist Frances Ashcroft<\/a> from Oxford. \u00a0Last week she and I joined the panel (along with Caroline Criado-Perez<\/a>, Jody Day<\/a>, Eileen Cooper<\/a>\u00a0 and Kelley Temple<\/a>) for a Q and A session in the Science Museum for the launch of the project (see more here<\/a>). The questions, slow to come at first from a mainly female audience who took a while to warm up\/gain courage to quiz us, were ultimately quite deep and challenging. Let me simply home in on the one specifically STEM-related question. What, we were asked, is the right way to respond to the comment ‘You don’t look like a mathematician<\/em>‘. I’d be interested in people’s views on this, which manifests itself in various forms (‘you look too young to be a doctor<\/em>‘ is a common variant). The best I could come up with on the spot was to suggest challenging those who ask this question to say what they think a mathematician should look like, in the hopes it will make them realise the existence of their prejudices or appreciate the danger of stereotyping. I am sure, however, there are better ways of handling the question.<\/p>\n

Continuing the theme of worrying about what one looks like, the next night I found myself bizarrely discussing, with a retired (male) head of a Cambridge college, whether men or women have a harder time with regard to getting their attire right in unfamiliar situations. The occasion was the dinner following the installation of the new master of Selwyn College Roger Mosey<\/a>, freshly arrived from the BBC to take on this role, where I was acting as the Vice Chancellor’s deputy. I found it interesting that this man across the table from me felt that there were more pitfalls for a man (turning up in T-shirt and jeans, perhaps, when something more formal was required) than for women who have in general a greater and more continuous spectrum of alternatives. I have always thought that that very fact made our problems worse, but he clearly felt the opposite. It seemed a fairly peculiar dinner table conversation, but highlights the importance of our appearance and our dress to define who we are and identify what ostensible power we have and what position in the social and professional hierarchy we occupy, so linking straight back to the What I See project.<\/p>\n

However that was not the most surreal part of my conversation that evening. Dutifully following the instructions of the seating plan I had found myself sitting between two recently retired (again male) college fellows from disciplines far from mine whom, as far as I was concerned, I had never met before. During the first course the one on my right remarked we had met previously on a mid-career training course run by the university. I am sure he must be right. He could cite one of the exercises we had carried out: write your own obituary to highlight to yourself how you see yourself – another connection with that mirror of Edwina Dunn’s project. He remembered I had been anxious about whether I would get promoted to professor, which indicates this is more than 15 years ago and yet he could still remember me. I found that unnerving but there was yet more to pile on.<\/p>\n

Switching to talk to the gentleman on my left during the next course, we covered his field of research and then moved on to discuss the portraits in the hall – all of past Masters of course. At which point he announced he remembered physicist Alan Cook<\/a>, one of these previous Selwyn masters, bringing me in to dinner. It took me some time to remember what the occasion can have been but I think it must have been an examiners’ dinner when Alan was the senior examiner and so hosted the dinner in his college. I can vaguely remember the occasion. So this ‘complete stranger’ too was claiming to remember me, in this case probably from even longer ago, maybe 20 years. Again, I feel pretty certain my dinner table companion must have been correct.<\/p>\n

The moral of this story for women is that we do actually have some advantages in the academic world. Since there are so (still) so lamentably few of us, we are memorable. I don’t believe I was unforgettable because I stood on the table and danced at the dinner in a drunken haze, because that’s not my way and I didn’t. Nor, I hope, did I let off steam at the training course about my colleagues in ways that made me stick in the first man’s memory, although that could conceivably be true if I thought I was discussing my life amongst total strangers, albeit ones in the small fishpond that is Cambridge. So it must have been just because I was the only woman both on that training course and on that board of examiners that I stood out in people’s memories, although I still find it unnerving that 15-20 years on their memories are so vivid as to identify me readily in a totally different context.<\/p>\n

However, women should realise as long as their numbers remain low in academia, they won’t simply blend in to the furniture. Uncomfortable though that often is, there are times (although this dinner was hardly one of them) where being unforgettable may mean you get that invitation, be it to talk at a conference, serve on some important committee or apply for an exciting job opportunity. It is often uncomfortable to stand out, particularly if we feel unsure as to who we are (or whether we feel we look attractive in the mirror to ourselves or anyone else) but sometimes, just sometimes, there may be advantages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do you see when you look in the mirror? This is the question underlying the What I See Project, conceived by Edwina Dunn. Her concern is that we live in a society where, for many women, when we look … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,27],"tags":[708,444,710,709,707],"class_list":["post-3878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equality","category-women-in-science","tag-edwina-dunn","tag-frances-ashcroft","tag-mirror","tag-selwyn-college","tag-what-i-see-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3878\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}